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Wtyt Htoergt&c iltterature Series? 



MANNERS, FRIENDSHIP 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 

BY 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

EDITED BY 

MARY A. JORDAN, M. A. 

Professor of English Language and Literature 
Smith College 




HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

Boston : 4 Park Street ; New York : 85 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago : 378-388 Wabash Avenue 



M 



CONTENTS 

History, Essays, First Series 133 

Politics, Essays, Second Series 163 

Behavior, Conduct of Life 181 

Manners, Essays, Second Series 205 

Friendship, Essays, First Series 233 

Explanatory and Critical Notes 



COPYRIGHT 1903 AND 1904 BY EDWARD W. EMERSON 
COPYRIGHT I907 BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



UiHARYwf CONGRESS 
I wo Cooles Received 

SEP 18 isor 

Copyright Entry 

Sep /<h r<?<>7 

CLAfeS^ XXc. f No. 
COPY D. 



HISTORY 

There is no great and no small * 
To the Soul that maketh all: 
And where it cometh, all things are; 
And it cometh everywhere. 



I am the owner of the sphere, 2 

Of the seven stars and the solar year, 

Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain, 

Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakspeare's strain. 



HISTORY 

There is one mind common to all individual men. 
Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. 
He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made 
a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, 
he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what 
at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. 
Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to 
all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sov- 
ereign agent. 

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its 
genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man 
is explicable by nothing less than all his history. With- 
out hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth 
from the beginning to embody every faculty, every 
thought, every emotion which belongs to it, in appro- 
priate events. But the thought is always prior to the 
fact; all the facts of history 3 preexist in the mind as 
laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances pre- 
dominant, and the limits of nature give power to but 
one at a time. A man is the whole encylopsedia of facts. 
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, 
and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie 
folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, 
camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are 
merely the application of his manifold spirit to the 
manifold world. 

This human mind wrote history, and this must read 
it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole 



136 ESSAYS 

of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from 
individual experience. There is a relation between the 
hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air 
I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of na- 
ture, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hun- 
dred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body 
depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centri- 
petal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the 
ages and the ages explained by the hours. Of the uni- 
versal mind each individual man is one more incar- 
nation. All its properties consist 4 in him. Each new 
fact in his private experience flashes a light on what 
great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his 
life refer to national crises. Every revolution 5 was 
first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same 
thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that 
era. Every reform was once a private opinion, 6 and 
when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve 
the problem of the age. The fact narrated must cor- 
respond to something in me to be credible or intelligi- 
ble. We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, 
Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must 
fasten these images to some reality in our secret experi- 
ence, or we shall learn nothing rightly. What befell 7 
Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia 8 is as much an illustration 
of the mind's powers and depravations as what has 
befallen us. Each new law and political movement 
has a meaning for you. Stand before each of its tablets 
and say, ' Under this mask did my Proteus nature hide 
itself. ' This remedies the defect of our too great near- 
ness to ourselves. This throws our actions into per- 
spective, — and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance 
and the waterpot lose their meanness when hung as 
signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without 



HISTORY 137 

heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, 
and Catiline. 

It is the universal nature which gives worth to par- 
ticular men and things. Human life, as containing 
this, is mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it 
round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence 
their ultimate reason ; all express more or less distinctly 
some command of this supreme, illimitable essence. 
Property also holds of the soul, covers great spiritual 
facts, and instinctively we at first hold to it with swords 
and laws and wide and complex combinations. The 
obscure consciousness of this fact is the light of all our 
day, 9 the claim of claims; the plea for education, for 
justice, for charity; the foundation of friendship and 
love and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to 
acts of self-reliance. It is remarkable that involun- 
tarily we always read as superior beings. 10 Universal 
history, the poets, the romancers, do not in their state- 
liest pictures, — in the sacerdotal, the imperial pal- 
aces, in the triumphs of will or of genius, — anywhere 
lose our ear, anywhere make us feel that we intrude, 
that this is for better men ; but rather is it true that in 
their grandest strokes we feel most at home. All that 
Shakspeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that 
reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We 
sympathize in the great moments of history, in the 
great discoveries, the great resistances, the great pros- 
perities of men; — because there law was enacted, the 
sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was 
struck, for us, as we ourselves in that place would 
have done or applauded. 

We have the same interest in condition and charac- 
ter. We honor the rich because they have externally 
the freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be pro- 



138 ESSAYS 

per to man, proper to us. So all that is said of the wise 
man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes 
to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained 
but attainable self. All literature writes the charac- 
ter of the wise man. Books, monuments, pictures, con- 
versation, are portraits in which he finds the lineaments 
he is forming. The silent and the eloquent praise him 
and accost him, and he is stimulated wherever he moves, 
as by personal allusions. A true aspirant therefore 
never needs look for allusions personal and laudatory u 
in discourse. He hears the commendation, not of him- 
self, but, more sweet, of that character he seeks, in 
every word that is said concerning character, yea fur- 
ther in every fact and circumstance, — in the running 
river and the rustling corn. Praise is looked, homage 
tendered, love flows, from mute nature, from the moun- 
tains and the lights of the firmament. 

These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, 
let us use in broad day. The student is to read history 
actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the 
text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, 
the Muse of history will utter oracles, as never to those 
who do not respect themselves. I have no expectation 
that any man will read history aright who thinks that 
what was done in a remote age, by men whose names 
have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what 
he is doing to-day. 

The world exists for the education of each man. 
There is no age or state of society or mode of action in 
history to which there is not somewhat corresponding 
in his life. Everything tends in a wonderful manner 
to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. 
He should see that he can live all history in his own 
person. He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer 



HISTORY 139 

himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know 
that he is greater than all the geography and all the 
government of the world ; he must transfer the point 
of view from which history is commonly read, from 
Rome and Athens and London, to himself, and not 
deny his conviction that he is the court, and if Eng- 
land or Egypt have anything to say to him he will try 
the case; if not, let them forever be silent. He must 
attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yield 
their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike. 
The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature, be- 
trays itself in the use we make of the signal narrations 
of history. Time dissipates to shining ether the solid 
angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences 
avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Pal- 
estine, and even early Rome are passing already into 
fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in 
Gibeon, 12 is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who 
cares what the fact was, when we have made a con- 
stellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign? 
London and Paris and New York must go the same 
way. " What is history, " said Napoleon, " but a fable 
agreed upon ? " This life of ours is stuck round with 
Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonization, 
Church, Court and Commerce, as with so many flow- 
ers and wild ornaments grave and gay. I will not 
make more account of them. I believe in Eternity. I 
can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain and the Islands, — 
the genius and creative principle of each and of all 
eras, in my own mind. 

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts 
of history in our private experience and verifying them 
here. All history becomes subjective; in other words 
there is properly no history, only biography. Every 



140 ESSAYS 

mind must know the whole lesson for itself, — must 
go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what 
it does not live, it will not know. What the former age 
has epitomized into a formula or rule for manipular 
convenience it will lose all the good of verifying for it- 
self, by means of the wall of that rule. Somewhere, 
sometime, it will demand and find compensation for 
that loss, by doing the work itself. Ferguson discov- 
ered many things in astronomy which had long been 
known. The better for him. 

History must be this or it is nothing. Every law 
which the state enacts indicates a fact in human na- 
ture; that is all. We must in ourselves see the neces- 
sary reason of every fact, — see how it could and must 
be. So stand before every public and private work; be- 
fore an oration of Burke, before a victory of Napoleon, 
before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, 
of Marmaduke Robinson; 13 before a French Reign of 
Terror, and a Salem hanging of witches; before a fan- 
atic Revival and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in 
Providence. We assume that we under like influence 
should be alike affected, and should achieve the like; 
and we aim to master intellectually the steps and reach 
the same height or the same degradation that our fel- 
low, our proxy has done. 

All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting 
the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the 
Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis, 14 — .is the desire to 
do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There or 
Then, and introduce in its place the Here and the Now. 
Belzoni 15 digs and measures in the mummy-pits and 
pyramids of Thebes until he can see the end of the 
difference between the monstrous work and himself. 
When he has satisfied himself, in general and in detail, 



HISTORY 141 

that it was made by such a person as he, so armed and 
so motived, and to ends to which he himself should also 
have worked, the problem is solved; his thought lives 
along the whole line of temples and sphinxes and cata- 
combs, passes through them all with satisfaction, and 
they live again to the mind, or are now. le 

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us 
and not done by us. Surely it was by man, but we find 
it not in our man. But we apply ourselves to the history 
of its production. We put ourselves into the place and 
state of the builder. We remember the forest-dwellers, 
the first temples, the adherence to the first type, and 
the decoration of it as the wealth of the nation increased ; 
the value which is given to wood by carving led to the 
carving over the whole mountain of stone of a cathe- 
dral. When we have gone through this process, and 
added thereto the Catholic Church, its cross, its music, 
its processions, its Saints' days and image-worship, we 
have as it were been the man that made the minster; 
we have seen how it could and must be. We have the 
sufficient reason. 

The difference between men is in their principle of 
association. Some men classify objects by color and 
size and other accidents of appearance; others by in- 
trinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause and effect. 
The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of 
causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poet, 
to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendlv 
and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men 
divine. For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights 
the circumstance. Every chemical substance, every 
plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of 
cause, the variety of appearance. 

Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creat- 



142 ESSA YS 

ing nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, why 
should we be such hard pedants, and magnify a few 
forms? Why should we make account of time, or of 
magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows them not, 
and genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with 
them as a young child plays with graybeards and in 
churches. Genius studies the causal thought, and far 
back in the womb of things sees the rays parting from 
one orb, that diverge, ere they fall, by infinite diame- 
ters. Genius watches the monad 17 through all his 
masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature. 
Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar, 
through the grub, through the egg 9 the constant individ- 
ual; through countless individuals the fixed species; 
through many species the genus; through all genera 
the steadfast type; through all the kingdoms of organ- 
ized life the eternal unity. Nature is a mutable cloud 
which is always and never the same. She casts the same 
thought into troops of forms, as a poet makes twenty 
fables with one moral. Through the bruteness 18 and 
toughness of matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to 
its own will. The adamant streams into soft but pre- 
cise form before it, and whilst I look at it its outline and 
texture are changed again. Nothing is so fleeting as 
form; yet never does it quite deny itself. In man we 
still trace the remains or hints of all that we esteem 
badges of servitude in the lower races; yet in him they 
enchance his nobleness and grace; as Io, in iEschylus, 19 
transformed to a cow, offends the imagination; but 
how changed when as Isis in Egypt she meets Osiris- 
Jove, a beautiful woman with nothing of the metamor- 
phosis left but the lunar horns as the splendid ornament 
of her brows! 

The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diver- 



HISTORY 143 

sity equally obvious. There is, at the surface, infinite 
variety of things; at the centre there is simplicity of 
cause. How many are the acts of one man in which we 
recognize the same character! Observe the sources of 
our information in respect to the Greek genius. We have 
the civil history of that people, as Herodotus, Thucyd- 
ides, Xenophon, and Plutarch 20 have given it; a very 
sufficient account of what manner of persons they were 
and what they did. We have the same national mind 
expressed for us again in their literature, 21 in epic and 
lyric poems, drama, and philosophy; a very complete 
form. Then we have it once more in their architecture, 
a beauty as of temperance itself, limited to the straight 
line and the square, — a builded geometry. Then we 
have it once again in sculpture, the "tongue on the 
balance of expression, " 22 a multitude of forms in the 
utmost freedom of action and never transgressing the 
ideal serenity; like votaries performing some religious 
dance before the gods, and, though in convulsive pain 
or mortal combat, never daring to break the figure and 
decorum of their dance. Thus of the genius of one re- 
markable people we have a fourfold representation: 
and to the senses what more unlike than an ode of Pin- 
dar, a marble centaur, the peristyle of the Parthenon, 
and the last actions of Phocion ? 

Every one must have observed faces and forms 
which, without any resembling feature, make a like 
impression on the beholder. A particular picture or 
copy of verses, if it do not awaken the same train of 
images, will yet superinduce the same sentiment as 
some wild mountain walk, although the resemblance 
is nowise obvious to the senses, but is occult and out 
of the reach of the understanding. Nature is an end- 
less combination and repetition of a very few laws. 



144 ESS A YS 

She hums the old well-known air through innumer- 
able variations. 23 

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness through- 
out her works, and delights in startling us with resem- 
blances in the most unexpected quarters. I have seen 
the head of an old sachem of the forest which at once 
reminded the eye of a bald mountain summit, and the 
furrows of the brow suggested the strata of the rock. 24 
There are men whose manners have the same essential 
splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the 
friezes of the Parthenon and the remains of the earliest 
Greek art. And there are compositions of the same 
strain to be found in the books of all ages. What is 
Guido's Rospigliosi Aurora 25 but a morning thought, 
as the horses in it are only a morning cloud ? If any one 
will but take pains to observe the variety of actions 
to which he is equally inclined in certain moods of mind 
and those to which he is averse, he will see how deep 
is the chain of affinity. 

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree 
without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child 
by studying the outlines of its form merely, — but by 
watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter 
enters into his nature and can then draw him at will 
in every attitude. So Roos 26 " entered into the inmost 
nature of a sheep. " I knew a draughtsman employed 
in a public survey who found that he could not sketch 
the rocks until their geological structure was first ex- 
plained to him. 27 In a certain state of thought is the 
common origin of very diverse works. It is the spirit 
and not the fact that is identical. By a deeper appre- 
hension, and not primarily by a painful acquisition of 
many manual skills, the artist attains the power of 
awakening other souls to a given activity. 



HISTORY 145 

It has been said that " common souls pay with what 
they do, nobler souls with that which they are." 28 And 
why ? Because a profound nature awakens in us by its 
actions and words, by its very looks and manners, the 
same power and beauty that a gallery of sculpture or 
of pictures addresses. 

Civil and natural history, the history of art and of 
literature, must be explained from individual history, 
or must remain words. There is nothing but is related 
to us, nothing that does not interest us, — kingdom, 
college, tree, horse, or iron shoe, — the roots of all 
things are in man. Santa Croce and the Dome of St. 
Peter's are lame copies after a divine model. 29 Stras- 
burg Cathedral is a material counterpart of the soul 
of Erwin of Steinbach. 30 The true poem is the poet's 
mind; the true ship is the ship-builder. In the man, 
could we lay him open, we should see the reason for 
the last flourish and tendril of his work; as every spine 
and tint in the sea-shell preexists in the secreting or- 
gans of the fish. The whole of heraldry and of chiv- 
alry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall pro- 
nounce your name with all the ornament that titles 
of nobility could ever add. 

The trivial experience of every day is always verify- 
ing some old prediction to us and converting into things 
the words and signs which we had heard and seen with- 
out heed. A lady with whom I was riding in the forest 
said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, 
as if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds 
until the wayfarer had passed onward; a thought 
which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies, 
which breaks off on the approach of human feet. The 
man who has seen the rising moon break out of the 
clouds at midnight, has been present like an archangel 



146 ESS A YS 

at the creation of light and of the world. I remember 
one summer day in the fields my companion pointed 
out to me a broad cloud, which might extend a quarter 
of a mile parallel to the horizon, quite accurately in the 
form of a cherub as painted over churches, a round 
block in the centre, which it was easy to animate with 
eyes and mouth, supported on either side by wide- 
stretched symmetrical wings. 31 What appears once in 
the atmosphere may appear often, and it was undoubt- 
edly the archetype of that familiar ornament. I have 
seen in the sky a chain of summer lightning which at 
once showed to me that the Greeks drew from na- 
ture when they painted the thunderbolt in the hand 
of Jove. I have seen a snow-drift 32 along the sides of 
the stone wall which obviously gave the idea of the 
common architectural scroll to abut a tower. 33 

By surrounding ourselves with the original circum- 
stances we invent anew the orders and the ornaments 
of architecture, as we see how each people merely 
decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric temple pre- 
serves the semblance of the wooden cabin in which the 
Dorian dwelt. The Chinese pagoda is plainly a Tartar 
tent. The Indian and Egyptian temples still betray the 
mounds and subterranean houses of their forefathers. 
"The custom of making houses and tombs in the liv- 
ing rock," says Heeren 34 in his Researches on the 
Ethopians, "determined very naturally the principal 
character of the Nubian Egyptian architecture to the 
colossal form which it assumed. In these caverns, 
already prepared by nature, the eye was accustomed 
to dwell on huge shapes and masses, so that when art 
came to the assistance of nature it could not move on 
a small scale without degrading itself. What would 
statues of the usual size, or neat porches and wings 



HISTORY 147 

have been, associated with those gigantic halls before 
which only Colossi could sit as watchmen or lean on 
the pillars of the interior?" 

The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude 
adaptation of the forest trees, with all their boughs, to 
a festal or solemn arcade; as the bands about the cleft 
pillars still indicate the green withes that tied them. 
No one can walk in a road cut through pine woods, 
without being struck with the architectural appear- 
ance of the grove, especially in winter, when the barren- 
ness of all other trees shows the low arch of the Saxons. 
In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as 
readily the origin of the stained glass window, with 
which the Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors 
of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing 
branches of the forest. Nor can any lover of nature 
enter the old piles of Oxford and the English cathe- 
drals, without feeling that the forest overpowered the 
mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and 
plane still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, 
its locust, elm, oak, pine, fir and spruce. 

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone sub- 
dued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. 
The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, 
with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the 
aerial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty. 

In like manner all public facts are to be individual- 
ized, all private facts are to be generalized. Then at 
once History becomes fluid and true, and Biography 
deep and sublime. As the Persian imitated in the 
slender shafts and capitals of his architecture the stem 
and flower of the lotus and palm, so the Persian court 
in its magnificent era never gave over the nomadism 
of its barbarous tribes, but travelled from Ecbatana, 



148 ESS A YS 

where the spring was spent, to Susa in summer and to 
Babylon for the winter. 

In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism 
and Agriculture are the two antagonist facts. The 
geography of Asia and of Africa necessitated a no- 
madic life. But the nomads were the terror of all those 
whom the soil or the advantages of a market had 
induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a 
religious injunction, because of the perils of the state 
from nomadism. And in these late and civil countries 
of England and America these propensities still fight 
out the old battle, in the nation and in the individual. 
The nomads of Africa were constrained to wander, by 
the attacks of the gad-fly, which drives the cattle mad, 
and so compels the tribe to emigrate in the rainy sea- 
son and to drive off the cattle to the higher sandy re- 
gions. The nomads of Asia follow the pasturage from 
month to month. In America and Europe the no- 
madism is of trade and curiosity; a progress, certainly, 
from the gad-fly of Astaboras 35 to the Anglo and Italo- 
mania of Boston Bay. Sacred cities, to which a period- 
ical religious pilgrimage was enjoined, or stringent 
laws and customs tending to invigorate the national 
bond, were the check on the old rovers; and the cu- 
mulative values of long residence are the restraints 
on the itinerancy of the present day. The antagonism 
of the two tendencies is not less active in individuals, as 
the love of adventure or the love of repose happens to 
predominate. A man of rude health and flowing spir- 
its has the faculty of rapid domestication, lives in his 
wagon and roams through all latitudes as easily as a 
Calmuc. 36 At sea, or in the forest, or in the snow, 
he sleeps as warm, dines with as good appetite, and 
associates as happily as beside his own chimneys. Or 



HISTORY 149 

perhaps his facility is deeper seated, in the increased 
range of his faculties of observation, which yield him 
points of interest wherever fresh objects meet his eyes. 
The pastoral nations were needy and hungry to des- 
peration; and this intellectual nomadism, in its excess, 
bankrupts 37 the mind through the dissipation of power 
on a miscellany of objects. The home-keeping wit, 
on the other hand, is that continence or content which 
finds all the elements of life in its own soil; and which 
has its own perils of monotony and deterioration, if 
not stimulated by foreign infusions. 

Everything the individual sees without him corre- 
sponds to his states of mind, and everything is in turn 
intelligible to him, as his onward thinking leads him 
into the truth to which that fact or series belongs. 

The primeval world,— the Fore-World, 38 as the Ger- 
mans say, — I can dive to it in myself as well as grope 
for it with researching fingers in catacombs, libraries, 
and the broken reliefs and torsos of ruined villas. 

What is the foundation of that interest all men 
feel in Greek history, letters, art and poetry, in all its 
periods from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the 
domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or 
five centuries later? What but this, that every man 
passes personally through a Grecian period. The Gre- 
cian state is the era of the bodily nature, the perfection 
of the senses, — of the spiritual nature unfolded in 
strict unity with the body. In it existed those human 
forms which supplied the sculptor with his models 
of Hercules, Phoebus and Jove; not like the forms 
abounding in the streets of modern cities, wherein the 
face is a confused blur of features, but composed of 
incorrupt, sharply defined and symmetrical features, 
whose eye-sockets are so formed that it would be im- 



150 ESSAYS 

possible for such eyes to squint and take furtive glances 
on this side and on that, but they must turn the whole 
head. The manners of that period are plain and fierce. 
The reverence exhibited is for personal qualities; cour- 
age, address, self-command, justice, strength, swiftness, 
a loud voice, a broad chest. Luxury and elegance 
are not known. A sparse population and want make 
every man his own valet, cook, butcher and soldier, 
and the habit of supplying his own needs educates 
the body to wonderful performances. Such are the 
Agamemnon and Diomed of Homer, and not far dif- 
ferent is the picture Xenophon gives of himself and 
his compatriots in the Retreat of the Ten Thou- 
sand. "After the army had crossed the river Tele- 
boas in Armenia, there fell much snow, and the troops 
lay miserably on the ground covered with it. But 
Xenophon arose naked, and taking an axe, began to 
split wood; whereupon others rose and did the like." 
Throughout his army exists a boundless liberty of 
speech. They quarrel for plunder, they wrangle with 
the generals on each new order, and Xenophon is as 
sharp-tongued as any and sharper-tongued than most, 
and so gives as good as he gets. Who does not see that 
this is a gang of great boys, with such a code of honor 
and such lax discipline as great boys have ? 

The costly charm 39 of the ancient tragedy, and in- 
deed of all the old literature, is that the persons speak 
simply, — speak as persons who have great good sense 
without knowing it, before yet the reflective habit 
has become the predominant habit of the mind. Our 
admiration of the antique is not admiration of the 
old, but of the natural. The Greeks are not reflective, 
but perfect in their senses and in their health, with 
the finest physical organization in the world. Adults 



HISTORY 151 

acted with the simplicity and grace of children. They 
made vases, tragedies and statues, 40 such as healthy 
senses should, — that is, in good taste. Such things 
have continued to be made in all ages, and are now, 
wherever a healthy physique exists; but, as a class, 
from their superior organization, they have surpassed 
all. They combine the energy of manhood with the 
engaging unconsciousness of childhood. The attrac- 
tion of these manners is that they belong to man, and 
are known to every man in virtue of his being once a 
child; besides that there are always individuals who 
retain these characteristics. A person of childlike 
genius and inborn energy is still a Greek, and revives 
our love of the Muse of Hellas. I admire the love of 
nature in the Philoctetes. 41 In reading those fine apos- 
trophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, mountains and 
waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I feel 
the eternity of man, the identity of his thought. The 
Greek had, it seems, the same fellow-beings as I. The 
sun and moon, water and fire, met his heart precisely 
as they meet mine. Then the vaunted distinction 
between Greek and English, 42 between Classic and 
Romantic schools, seems superficial and pedantic. 4 * 
When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me, — 
when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, 
time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a 
perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same 
hue, and do as it were run into one, why should I mea- 
sure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian 
years ? 

The student interprets the age of chivalry by his 
own age of chivalry, and the days of maritime adven- 
ture and circumnavigation by quite parallel miniature 
experiences of his own. To the sacred history of the 



152 ESSAYS 

world he has the same key. When the voice of a prophet 
out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a sen- 
timent of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then 
pierces to the truth through all the confusion of tra- 
dition and the caricature of institutions. 

Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, 
who disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that men 
of God have from time to time walked among men 
and made their commission felt in the heart and soul 
of the commonest hearer. Hence evidently the tripod, 
the priest, the priestess inspired by the divine afflatus. 

Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. 
They cannot unite him to history, or reconcile him with 
themselves. As they come to revere their intuitions 
and aspire to live holily, 44 their own piety explains 
every fact, every word. 

How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, 
of Menu, 45 of Socrates, domesticate themselves in the 
mind. I cannot find any antiquity in them. They are 
mine as much as theirs. 

I have seen the first monks and anchorets, without 
crossing seas or centuries. More than once some in- 
dividual has appeared to me with such negligence of 
labor and such commanding contemplation, a haughty 
beneficiary begging in the name of God, as made good 
to the nineteenth century Simeon the Stylite, the The- 
bais, and the first Capuchins. 46 

The priestcraft of the East and West, of theMagian, 47 
Brahmin, Druid, and Inca, is expounded in the indi- 
vidual's private life. The cramping influence of a hard 
formalist on a young child, in repressing his spirits and 
courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that with- 
out producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, 
and even much sympathy with the tyranny, — is a 



HISTORY 153 

familiar fact, explained to the child when he becomes 
a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth 
is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and 
words and forms of whose influence he was merely the 
organ to the youth. The fact teaches him how Belus 48 
was worshipped and how the Pyramids were built, 
better than the discovery by Champollion 49 of the 
names of all the workmen and the cost of every tile. 
He finds Assyria and the Mounds of Cholula 50 at his 
door, and himself has laid the courses. 

Again, in that protest which each considerate per- 
son makes against the superstition of his times, he 
repeats step by step the part of old reformers, and in 
the search after truth finds, like them, new perils to 
virtue. He learns again what moral vigor is needed to 
supply the girdle of a superstition. A great licentious- 
ness treads on the heels of a reformation. How many 
times in the history of the world has the Luther of the 
day had to lament the decay of piety in his own house- 
hold! "Doctor," said his wife to Martin Luther, one 
day, "how is it that whilst subject to papacy we prayed 
so often and with such fervor, whilst now we pray with 
the utmost coldness and very seldom?" 

The advancing man discovers how deep a property 
he has in literature, — in all fable as well as in all his- 
tory. He finds that the poet was no odd fellow who 
described strange and impossible situations, but that 
universal man wrote by his pen a confession true for 
one and true for all. His own secret biography he finds 
in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down 
before he was born. One after another he comes up in 
his private adventures with every fable of iEsop, of 
Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and 
verifies them with his own head and hands. 



154 ESSAYS 

The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper 
creations of the imagination and not of the fancy, are 
universal verities. What a range of meanings and 
what perpetual pertinence has the story of Prometheus ! 
Beside its primary value as the first chapter of the his- 
tory of Europe (the mythology thinly veiling authentic 
facts, the invention of the mechanic arts and the mi- 
gration of colonies), it gives the history of religion, 
with some closeness to the faith of later ages. Prome- 
theus is the Jesus of the old mythology. He is the 
friend of man; stands between the unjust "justice" 
of the Eternal Father and the race of mortals, and 
readily suffers all things on their account. But where 
it departs from the Calvinistic Christianity and exhibits 
him as the defier of Jove, it represents a state of mind 
which readily appears wherever the doctrine of Theism 
is taught in a crude, objective form, and which seems 
the self-defence of man against this untruth, namely a 
discontent with the believed fact that a God exists, and 
a feeling that the obligation of reverence is onerous. It 
would steal if it could the fire of the Creator, and live 
apart from him and independent of him. The Pro- 
metheus Vinctus 51 is the romance of skepticism. Not 
less true to all time are the details of that stately apo- 
logue. Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus, said the 
poets. When the gods come among men, they are not 
known. Jesus was not; Socrates and Shakspeare 
were not. Antaeus was suffocated by the gripe of Her- 
cules, but every time he touched his mother-earth his 
strength was renewed. Man is the broken giant, and 
in all his weakness both his body and his mind are 
invigorated by habits of conversation with nature. 
The power of music, the power of poetry, to unfix and 
as it were clap wings to solid nature, interprets the 



HISTORY 155 

riddle of Orpheus. 52 The philosophical perception 
of identity through endless mutations of form makes 
him know the Proteus. What else am I who laughed 
or wept yesterday, who slept last night like a corpse, 
and this morning stood and ran ? And what see I 
on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus? I 
can symbolize my thought by using the name of any 
creature, of any fact, because every creature is man 
agent or patient. Tantalus is but a name for you and 
me. Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking 
the waters of thought which are always gleaming and 
waving within sight of the soul. 53 The transmigration 
of souls is no fable. I would it were; but men and 
women are only half human. Every animal of the 
barn-yard, the field and the forest, of the earth and of 
the waters that are under the earth, has contrived to 
get a footing and to leave the print of its features and 
form in some one or other of these upright, heaven- 
facing speakers. Ah! brother, stop the ebb of thy soul, 54 
— ebbing downward into the forms into whose habits 
thou hast now for many years slid. As near and proper 
to us is also that old fable of the Sphinx, who was said 
to sit in the road-side and put riddles to every pas- 
senger. If the man could not answer, she swallowed 
him alive. If he could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was 
slain. What is our life but an endless flight of winged 
facts or events? In splendid variety these changes 
come, all putting questions to the human spirit. Those 
men who cannot answer by a superior wisdom these 
facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts encumber 
them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of 
routine, the men of se?ise, in whom a literal obedience 
to facts has extinguished every spark of that light by 
which man is truly man. But if the man is true to his 



156 ESSAYS 

better instincts or sentiments, and refuses the domin- 
ion of facts, as one that comes of a higher race; re- 
mains fast by the soul and sees the principle, then the 
facts fall aptly and supple into their places; they know 
their master, and the meanest of them glorifies him. 

See in Goethe's Helena 55 the same desire that every 
word should be a thing. These figures, he would say, 
these Chirons, 56 Griffins, 57 Phorkyas, 58 Helen and 
Leda, 59 are somewhat, and do exert a specific influ- 
ence on the mind. So far then are they eternal enti- 
ties, as real to-day as in the first Olympiad. Much 
revolving them he writes out freely his humor, and 
gives them body to his own imagination. And although 
that poem be as vague and fantastic as a dream, yet 
is it much more attractive than the more regular dra- 
matic pieces of the same author, for the reason that 
it operates a wonderful relief to the mind from the 
routine of customary images, — awakens the reader's 
invention and fancy by the wild freedom of the de- 
sign, and by the unceasing succession of brisk shocks 
of surprise. 

The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature 
of the bard, sits on his neck and writes through his 
hand ; so that when he seems to vent a mere caprice and 
wild romance, the issue is an exact allegory. Hence 
Plato said that "poets utter great and wise things 
which they do not themselves understand." All the 
fictions of the Middle Age explain themselves as a 
masked or frolic expression of that which in grave 
earnest the mind of that period toiled to achieve. 
Magic and all that is ascribed to it is a deep presenti- 
ment of the powers of science. 60 The shoes of swift- 
ness, the sword of sharpness, the power of subduing 
the elements, of using the secret virtues of minerals, of 



HISTORY 157 

understanding the voices of birds, are the obscure 
efforts of the mind in a right direction. The preter- 
natural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual youth, 
and the like, are alike the endeavor of the human spirit 
"to bend the shows of things to the desires of the 
mind." 

In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul 61 a garland and 
a rose bloom on the head of her who is faithful, and 
fade on the brow of the inconstant. In the story of 
the Boy and the Mantle 62 even a mature reader may 
be surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the 
triumph of the gentle Venelas; and indeed all the 
postulates of elfin annals, — that the fairies do not 
like to be named; that their gifts are capricious and 
not to be trusted; that who seeks a treasure must not 
speak; and the like, — I find true in Concord, how- 
ever they might be in Cornwall or Bretagne. 

Is it otherwise in the newest romance ? I read the 
Bride of Lammermoor. Sir William Ashton is a mask 
for a vulgar temptation, Ravenswood Castle a fine 
name for proud poverty, and the foreign mission of 
state only a Bunyan disguise for honest industry. We 
may all shoot a wild bull that would toss the good and 
beautiful, by fighting down the unjust and sensual. 
Lucy Ashton is another name for fidelity, which is 
always beautiful and always liable to calamity in this 
world. 

But along with the civil and metaphysical history 
of man, another history goes daily forward, — that of 
the external world, — in which he is not less strictly 
implicated. He is the compend of time ; 63 he is also the 
correlative of nature. His power consists in the multi- 
tude of his affinities, in the fact that his life is inter- 



158 ESSA YS 

twined with the whole chain of organic and inorganic 
being. In old Rome the public roads beginning at the 
Forum proceeded north, south, east, west, to the centre 
of every province of the empire, making each market- 
town of Persia, Spain and Britain pervious to the sol- 
diers of the capital : so out of the human heart go as 
it were highways to the heart of every object in nature, 
to reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a 
bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and 
fruitage is the world. His faculties refer to natures 
out of him and predict the world he is to inhabit, as 
the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the 
wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He can- 
not live without a world. 64 Put Napoleon in an island 
prison, let his faculties find no men to act on, no Alps 
to climb, no stake to play for, and he would beat the 
air, and appear stupid. Transport him to large coun- 
tries, dense population, complex interests and antago- 
nist power, and you shall see that the man Napoleon, 
bounded that is by such a profile and outline, is not 
the virtual Napoleon. This is but Talbot's shadow; — 

"His substance is not here. 
For what you see is but the smallest part 
And least proportion of humanity; 
But were the whole frame here, 
It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch, 
Your roof were not sufficient to contain it." 65 

Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon. 
Newton and Laplace 66 need myriads of age and thick- 
strewn celestial areas. One may say a gravitating 
solar system is already prophesied 67 in the nature of 
Newton's mind. Not less does the brain of Davy 68 or 
of Gay-Lussac, 69 from childhood exploring the affini- 
ties and repulsions of particles, anticipate the laws of 



HISTORY 159 

organization. Does not the eye of the human embryo 
predict the light ? the ear of Handel 70 predict the 
witchcraft of harmonic sound ? Do not the construc- 
tive fingers of Watt, Fulton, Whittemore, 71 Arkwright, 
predict the fusible, hard, and temperable texture of 
metals, the properties of stone, water, and wood ? Do 
not the lovely attributes of the maiden child predict 
the refinements and decorations of civil society ? Here 
also we are reminded of the action of man on man. A 
mind might ponder its thoughts for ages and not gain 
so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall 
teach it in a day. Who knows himself before he has 
been thrilled with indignation at an outrage, or has 
heard an eloquent tongue, or has shared the throb of 
thousands in a national exultation or alarm ? No 
man can antedate his experience, or guess what faculty 
or feeling a new object shall unlock, any more than he 
can draw to-day the face of a person whom he shall see 
to-morrow for the first time. 

I will not now go behind the general statement to 
explore the reason of this correspondency. Let it suf- 
fice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the 
mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history 
is to be read and written. 

Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and re- 
produce its treasures for each pupil. He too shall 
pass through the whole cycle of experience. He shall 
collect into a focus the rays of nature. History no 
longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate 
in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by 
languages and titles a catalogue of the volumes you 
have read. 72 You shall make me feel what periods you 
have lived. A man shall be the Temple of Fame. He 
shall walk, as the poets have described that goddess, 



160 ESS A YS 

in a robe painted all over with wonderful events and 
experiences; — his own form and features by their 
exalted intelligence shall be that variegated vest. I 
shall find in him the Foreworld; in his childhood the 
Age of Gold, the Apples of Knowledge, the Argonautic 
Expedition, the calling of Abraham, the building of 
the Temple, the Advent of Christ, Dark Ages, the 
Revival of Letters, the Reformation, the discovery of 
new lands, the opening of new sciences and new re- 
gions in man. He shall be the priest of Pan, and bring 
with him into humble cottages the blessing of the 
morning stars, and all the recorded benefits of heaven 
and earth. 

Is there somewhat overweening in this claim ? Then 
I reject all I have written, for what is the use of pre- 
tending to know what we know not? But it is the 
fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one 
fact without seeming to belie some other. I hold our 
actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in the 
wall, see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under 
foot, the lichen on the log. What do I know sympathet- 
ically, morally, of either of these worlds of life ? As 
old as the Caucasian man, — perhaps older, — these 
creatures have kept their counsel beside him, and there 
is no record of any word or sign that has passed from 
one to the other. What connection do the books show 
between the fifty or sixty chemical elements and the 
historical eras ? Nay, what does history yet record of 
the metaphysical annals of man ? What light does it 
shed on those mysteries which we hide under the 
names Death and Immortality? Yet every history 
should be written in a wisdom which divined the range 
of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols. I am 
ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so- 



HISTORY 161 

called History is. How many times we must say Rome, 
and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome 
know of rat and lizard ? 73 What are Olympiads and 
Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? 
Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for 
the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kanaka in his 
canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter ? 

Broader and deeper we must write our annals, — 
from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the 
ever new, ever sanative conscience, — if we would 
trulier express our central and wide-related nature, 
instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride 
to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that 
day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the 
path of science and of letters is not the way into nature. 
The idiot, the Indian, the child and unschooled farm- 
er's boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is 
to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary. 75 



POLITICS 

Gold and iron are good 

To buy iron and gold; 

All earth's fleece and food 

For their like are sold. 

Boded Merlin wise, 1 

Proved Napoleon great, — 

Nor kind nor coinage buys 

Aught above its rate. 

Fear, Craft, and Avarice 

Cannot rear a State. 

Out of dust to build 

What is more than dust, — 

Walls Amphion piled 

Phcebus stablish must. 

When the Muses nine 

With the Virtues meet, 

Find to their design 

An Atlantic seat, 

By green orchard boughs 

Fended from the heat, 

Where the statesman ploughs 

Furrow for the wheat; 

When the Church is social worth, 

When the state-house is the hearth, 

Then the perfect State is come, 

The republican at home. 



POLITICS 

In dealing with the State we ought to remember that 
its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed 
before we were born; that they are not superior to the 
citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a 
single man; every law and usage was a man's expe- 
dient to meet a particular case; that they all are inn- 
table, all alterable; we may make as good, we may 
make better. Society is an illusion to the young citizen. 
It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain names, 
men and institutions rooted like oak-trees to the centre, 
round which all arrange themselves the best they can. 
But the old statesman knows that society is fluid ; there 
are no such roots and centres, but any particle may 
suddenly become the centre of the movement and 
compel the system to gyrate round it; as every man of 
strong will, like Pisistratus 2 or Cromwell, 3 does for a 
time, and every man of truth, like Plato or Paul, does 
forever. But politics rest on necessary foundations, 
and cannot be treated with levity. Republics abound 
in young civilians who believe that the laws make the 
city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes 
of living and employments of the population, that com- 
merce, education and religion may be voted in or out; 
and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be 
imposed on a people if only you can get sufficient 
voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish 
legislation is a rope of sand 4 which perishes in the 
twisting; 5 that the State must follow and not lead the 
character and progress of the citizen; the strongest 



166 ESSAYS 

usurper is quickly got rid of ; and they only who build 
on Ideas, build for eternity; and that the form of gov- 
ernment which prevails is the expression of what culti- 
vation exists in the population which permits it. The 
law is only a memorandum. We are superstitious, 
and esteem the statute somewhat: so much life as it 
has in the character of living men is its force. The 
statute stands there to say, Yesterday we agreed so 
and so, but how feel ye this article to-day ? Our statute 
is a currency which we stamp with our own portrait: 
it soon becomes unrecognizable, and in process of time 
will return to the mint. Nature is not democratic, 
nor limited-monarchical, but despotic, and will not be 
fooled or abated of any jot of her authority by the 
pertest of her sons; and as fast as the public mind is 
opened to more intelligence, 6 the code is seen to be 
brute and stammering. 7 It speaks not articulately, 
and must be made to. Meantime the education of the 
general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and 
simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth 
dreams, and prays, and paints to-day, but shuns the 
ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the reso- 
lutions of public bodies; then shall be carried as griev- 
ance and bill of rights through conflict and war. and 
then shall be triumphant law and establishment for 
a hundred years, until it gives place in turn to new 
prayers and pictures. The history of the State sketches 
in coarse outline the progress of thought, and follows 
at a distance the delicacy of culture and of aspiration. 
The theory of politics which has possessed the mind 
of men, and which they have expressed the best they 
could in their laws and in their revolutions, considers 
persons and property as the two objects for whose 
protection government *»K?«*i«. Of persons, all have 



POLITICS 167 

equal rights, in virtue of being identical in nature. 
This interest of course with its whole power demands 
a democracy. Whilst the rights of all as persons are 
equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights 
in property are very unequal. One man owns his 
clothes, and another owns a county. This accident, 
depending primarily on the skill and virtue of the 
parties, of which there is every degree, and secondarily 
on patrimony, falls unequally, and its rights of course 
are unequal. Personal rights, universally the same, 
demand a government framed on the ratio of the 
census; property demands a government framed on 
the ratio of owners and of owning. Laban, 8 who has 
flocks and herds, wishes them looked after by an officer 
on the frontiers, lest the Midianites shall drive them 
off; and pays a tax to that end. Jacob has no flocks or 
herds and no fear of the Midianites, and pays no tax 
to the officer. It seemed fit that Laban and Jacob 
should have equal rights to elect the officer who is to 
defend their persons, but that Laban and not Jacob 
should elect the officer who is to guard the sheep and 
cattle. And if question arise whether additional officers 
or watch-towers should be provided, must not Laban 
and Isaac, and those who must sell part of their herds 
to buy protection for the rest, judge better of this, 
and with more right, than Jacob, who, because he is 
a youth and a traveller, eats their bread and not his 
own? 

In the earliest society the proprietors made their 
own wealth, and so long as it comes to the owners in the 
direct way, no other opinion would arise in any equi- 
table community than that property should make the 
law for property, and persons the law for persons. 

But property passes through donation or inheritance 



168 ESSA YS 

to those who do not create it. Gift, in one case, makes 
it as really the new owner's as labor made it the first 
owner's : in the other case, of patrimony, the law makes 
an ownership which will be valid in each man's view 
according to the estimate which he sets on the public 
tranquillity. 

It was not, however, found easy to embody the 
readily admitted principle that property should make 
law for property, and persons for persons; since per- 
sons and property mixed themselves in every trans- 
action. At last it seemed settled that the rightful dis- 
tinction was that the proprietors should have more 
elective franchise than non-proprietors, on the Spartan 
principle of "calling that which is just, equal; not that 
which is equal, just." 

That principle no longer looks so self-evident as it 
appeared in former times, partly because doubts have 
arisen 9 whether too much weight had not been al- 
lowed in the laws to property, and such a structure 
given to our usages as allowed the rich to encroach on 
the poor, and to keep them poor; but mainly because 
there is an instinctive sense, however obscure and yet 
inarticulate, that the whole constitution of property, 
on its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence 
on persons deteriorating and degrading; that truly 
the only interest for the consideration of the State is 
persons; that property will always follow persons; 
that the highest end of government is the culture of 
men; and that if men can be educated, the institutions 
will share their improvement and the moral sentiment 
will write the law of the land. 

If it be not easy to settle the equity of this question, 
the peril is less when we take note of our natural de- 
fences. We are kept by better guards than the vigi- 



POLITICS 169 

lance of such magistrates as we commonly elect. So- 
ciety always consists in greatest part of young and 
foolish persons. The old, who have seen through the 
hypocrisy of courts and statesmen, die and leave no 
wisdom to their sons. They believe their own news- 
paper, as their fathers did at their age. With such an 
ignorant and deceivable 10 majority, States would soon 
run to ruin, but that there are limitations beyond which 
the folly and ambition of governors cannot go. Things 
have their laws, as well as men; and things refuse to 
be trifled with. 11 Property will be protected. Corn will 
not grow unless it is planted and manured; but the 
farmer will not plant or hoe it unless the chances are 
a hundred to one that he will cut and harvest it. 12 
Under any forms, persons and property must and will 
have their just sway. They exert their power, as steadily 
as matter its attraction. Cover up a pound of earth 
never so cunningly, divide and subdivide it; melt it to 
liquid, convert it to gas; it will always weigh a pound; 
it will always attract and resist other matter by the 
full virtue of one pound weight : — and the attributes 
of a person, his wit and his moral energy, will exercise, 
under any law or extinguishing tyranny, their proper 
force, — if not overtly, then covertly ; if not for the law, 
then against it; if not wholesomely, then poisonously; 
with right, or by might. 

The boundaries of personal influence it is impossible 
to fix, as persons are organs of moral or supernatural 
force. Under the dominion of an idea which possesses 
the minds of multitudes, as civil freedom, or the relig- 
ious sentiment, the powers of persons 13 are no longer 
subjects of calculation. A nation of men unanimously 
bent on freedom or conquest can easily confound the 
arithmetic of statists, and achieve extravagant actions, 



170 ESSAYS 

out of all proportions to their means; as the Greeks, 
the Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans and the French 
have done. 

In like manner to every particle of property belongs 
its own attraction. A cent is the representative of a 
certain quantity of corn or other commodity. Its value 
is in the necessities of the animal man. It is so much 
warmth, so much bread, so much water, so much land. 
The law may do what it will with the owner of pro- 
perty; its just power will still attach to the cent. The 
law may in a mad freak say that all shall have power 
except the owners of property; they shall have no vote. 
Nevertheless, by a higher law, the property will, year 
after year, write every statute that respects property. 
The non-proprietor will be the scribe of the proprietor. 
What the owners wish to do, the whole power of pro- 
perty will do, either through the law or else in defiance 
of it. Of course I speak of all the property, not merely 
of the great estates. When the rich are outvoted, as 
frequently happens, it is the joint treasury of the poor 
which exceeds their accumulations. Every man owns 
something, if it is only a cow, or a wheelbarrow, or his 
arms, and so has that property to dispose of. 14 

The same necessity which secures the rights of per- 
son and property against the malignity or folly of the 
magistrate, determines the form and methods of gov- 
erning, which are proper to each nation and to its habit 
of thought, and nowise transferable to other states of 
society. In this country we are very vain of our politi- 
cal institutions, which are singular in this, that they 
sprung, within the memory of living men, from the 
character and condition of the people, which they still 
express with sufficient fidelity, — and we ostentatiously 
prefer them to any other in history. They are not 



POLITICS 171 

better, but only fitter for us. We may be wise in assert- 
ing the advantage in modern times of the democratic 
form, but to other states of society, in which religion 
consecrated the monarchical, that and not this was 
expedient. Democracy is better for us, because the 
religious sentiment of the present time accords better 
with it. Born democrats, we are nowise qualified to 
judge of monarchy, which, to our fathers living in the 
monarchical idea, was also relatively right. But our 
institutions, though in coincidence with the spirit of 
the age, have not any exemption from the practical 
defects which have discredited other forms. Every 
actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the 
laws too well. 15 What satire on government can equal 
the severity of censure conveyed in the word politic, 
which now for ages has signified cunning, intimating 
that the State is a trick? 

The same benign necessity and the same practical 
abuse appear in the parties, into which each State 
divides itself, of opponents and defenders of the ad- 
ministration of the government. Parties are also 
founded on instincts, 16 and have better guides to their 
own humble aims than the sagacity of their leaders. 
They have nothing perverse in their origin, but rudely 
mark some real and lasting relation. We might as 
wisely reprove the east wind or the frost, as a political 
party, whose members, for the most part, could give 
no account of their position, but stand for the defence 
of those interests in which they find themselves. Our 
quarrel with them begins when they quit this deep 
natural ground at the bidding of some leader, and 
obeying personal considerations, throw themselves 
into the maintenance and defence of points nowise 
belonging to their system. A party is perpetually cor- 



172 ESSAYS 

rupted by personality. Whilst we absolve the associa- 
tion from dishonesty, we cannot extend the same charity 
to their leaders. They reap the rewards of the docility 
and zeal of the masses which they direct. Ordinarily 
our parties are parties of circumstance, and not of 
principle; as the planting interest in conflict with the 
commercial; the party of capitalists and that of opera- 
tives: parties which are identical in their moral char- 
acter, and which can easily change ground with each 
other in the support of many of their measures. Par- 
ties of principle, as, religious sects, or the party of free- 
trade, of universal suffrage, of abolition of slavery, of 
abolition of capital punishment, — degenerate into 
personalities, or would inspire enthusiasm. The vice 
of our leading parties in this country (which may be 
cited as a fair specimen of these societies of opinion) 
is that they do not plant themselves on the deep and 
necessary grounds to which they are respectively en- 
titled, but lash themselves to fury in the carrying of 
some local and momentary measure, nowise useful to 
the commonwealth. Of the two great parties which at 
this hour almost share the nation between them, I 
should say that one has the best cause, and the other 
contains the best men. The philosopher, the poet, or 
the religious man, will of course wish to cast his vote 
with the democrat, for free-trade, for wide suffrage, 
for the abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code, 
and for facilitating in every manner the access of the 
young and the poor to the sources of wealth and power. 
But he can rarely accept the persons whom the so- 
called popular party propose to him as representatives 
of these liberalities. They have not at heart the ends 
which give to the name of democracy what hope and 
virtue are in it. The spirit of our American radicalism 



POLITICS 173 

is destructive and aimless: 17 it is not loving; it has no 
ulterior and divine ends, but is destructive only out of 
hatred and selfishness. On the other side, the conser- 
vative party, composed of the most moderate, able and 
cultivated part of the population, is timid, and merely 
defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it aspires 
to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no 
generous policy; it does not build, nor write, nor cherish 
the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor 
encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor be- 
friend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant. From 
neither party, when in power, has the world any benefit 
to expect in science, art or humanity, at all commen- 
surate with the resources of the nation. 

I do not for these defects despair of our republic. 
We are not at the mercy of any waves of chance. In 
the strife of ferocious parties, human nature always 
finds itself cherished; as the children of the convicts 
at Botany Bay 18 are found to have as healthy a moral 
sentiment as other children. Citizens of feudal states 
are alarmed at our democratic institutions lapsing into 
anarchy, and the older and more cautious among our- 
selves are learning from Europeans to look with some 
terror at our turbulent freedom. It is said that in our 
license of construing the Constitution, and in the des- 
potism of public opinion, we have no anchor; and one 
foreign observer thinks he has found the safeguard 
in the sanctity of Marriage among us; and another 
thinks he has found it in our Calvinism. Fisher Ames 19 
expressed the popular security more wisely, when he 
compared a monarchy and a republic, saying that a 
monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well, but will 
sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom ; whilst 
a republic is a raft, which would never sink, but then 



174 ESSAYS 

your feet are always in water. No forms can have any 
dangerous importance whilst we are befriended by the 
laws of things. It makes no difference how many tons' 
weight of atmosphere presses on our heads, so long as 
the same pressure resists it within the lungs. Augment 
the mass a thousand-fold, it cannot begin to crush us, 
as long as reaction is equal to action. The fact of two 
poles, of two forces, centripetal and centrifugal, is uni- 
versal, and each force by its own activity develops the 
other. Wild liberty develops iron conscience. 20 Want 
of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies 
conscience. 'Lynch-law' 21 prevails only where there 
is greater hardihood and self-subsistency in the leaders. 
A mob cannot be a permanency; everybody's interest 
requires that it should not exist, and only justice satis- 
fies all. 

We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity 
which shines through all laws. Human nature ex- 
presses itself in them as characteristically as in statues, 
or songs, or railroads; and an abstract of the codes of 
nations would be a transcript of the common con- 
science. Governments have their origin in the moral 
identity of men. Reason for one is seen to be reason 
for another, and for every other. There is a middle 
measure which satisfies all parties, be they never so 
many or so resolute for their own. Every man finds a 
sanction for his simplest claims and deeds, in decisions 
of his own mind, which he calls Truth and Holiness. 
In these decisions all the citizens find a perfect agree- 
ment, and only in these; not in what is good to eat, 
good to wear, good use of time, or what amount of 
land or of public aid each is entitled to claim. This 
truth and justice men presently endeavor to make 
application of to the measuring of land, the appor- 



POLITICS 175 

tionment of service, the protection of life and property. 
Their first endeavors, no doubt, are very awkward. 
Yet absolute right is the first governor; or, every gov- 
ernment is an impure theocracy. The idea after which 
each community is aiming to make and mend its law, 
is the will of the wise man. The wise man it cannot 
find in nature, 22 and it makes awkward but earnest 
efforts to secure his government by contrivance; as by 
causing the entire people to give their voices on every 
measure; or by a double choice to get the representa- 
tion of the whole; or by a selection of the best citizens; 
or to secure the advantages of efficiency and internal 
peace by confiding the government to one, who may 
himself select his agents. All forms of government 
symbolize an immortal government, common to all 
dynasties and independent of numbers, perfect where 
two men exist, perfect where there is only one man. 

Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement to 
him of the character of his fellows. My right and my 
wrong is their right and their wrong. Whilst I do what 
is fit for me, and abstain from what is unfit, my neigh- 
bor and I shall often agree in our means, and work to- 
gether for a time to one end. But whenever I find my 
dominion over myself not sufficient for me, and under- 
take the direction of him also, I overstep the truth, and 
come into false relations to him. I may have so much 
more skill or strength than he that he cannot express 
adequately his sense of wrong, but it. is a lie, and hurts 
like a lie both him and me. Love and nature cannot 
maintain the assumption; it must be executed by a 
practical lie, namely by force. This undertaking for 
another is the blunder which stands in colossal ugliness 
in the governments of the world. It is the same thing 
in numbers, as in a pair, only not quite so intelligible. 



176 ESSAYS 

I can see well enough a great difference between my 
setting myself down to a self-control, and my going to 
make somebody else act after my views; but when a 
quarter of the human race assume to tell me what I 
must do, I may be too much disturbed by the circum- 
stances to see so clearly the absurdity of their com- 
mand. Therefore all public ends look vague and 
quixotic beside private ones. For any laws but those 
which men make for themselves are laughable. 23 If I 
put myself in the place of my child, and we stand in 
one thought and see that things are thus or thus, that 
perception is law for him and me. We are both there, 
both act. But if, without carrying him into the thought, 
I look over into his plot, and, guessing how it is with 
him, ordain this or that, he will never obey me. This 
is the history of governments, — one man does some- 
thing which is to bind another. A man who cannot be 
acquainted with me taxes me ; looking from afar at me 
ordains that a part of my labor shall go to this or that 
whimsical end, — not as I, but as he happens to fancy. 
Behold the consequence. Of all debts men are least 
willing to pay the taxes. 24 What a satire is this on 
government! Everywhere they think they get their 
money's worth, except for these. 

Hence the less government we have the better, — 
the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The anti- 
dote to this abuse of formal government is the influence 
of private character, the growth of the Individual; the 
appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; 
the appearance of the wise man; of whom the existing 
government is, it must be owned, but a shabby imita- 
tion. That which all things tend to educe; which free- 
dom, cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, go to form 
and deliver, is character; that is the end of Nature, to 



POLITICS 177 

reach unto this coronation of her king. To educate 
the wise man the State exists, and with the appearance 
of the wise man the State expires. The appearance of 
character makes the State unnecessary. The wise man 
is the State. He needs no army, fort, or navy, — he 
loves men too well; no bribe, or feast, or palace, to 
draw friends to him; no vantage ground, no favorable 
circumstance. He needs no library, for he has not done 
thinking; no church, for he is a prophet; no statute- 
book, for he has the lawgiver; no money, for he is value; 
no road, for he is at home where he is; no experience, 
for the life of the creator shoots through him, and looks 
from his eyes. He has no personal friends, 25 for he who 
has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men 
unto him needs not husband and educate a few to 
share with him a select and poetic life. His relation 
to men is angelic; his memory is myrrh to them; his 
presence, frankincense and flowers. 

We think our civilization near its meridian, but we 
are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. 
In our barbarous society the influence of character is 
in its infancy. As a political power, as the rightful lord 
who is to tumble all rulers from their chairs, its pre- 
sence is hardly yet suspected. Malthus 26 and Ricardo 27 
quite omit it; the Annual Register 28 is silent; in the 
Conversations' Lexicon 29 it is not set down ; the Presi- 
dent's Message, the Queen's Speech, have not men- 
tioned it; and yet it is never nothing. Every thought 
which genius and piety throw into the world, alters 
the world. 30 The gladiators in the lists of power feel, 
through all their frocks of force 31 and simulation, the 
presence of worth. I think the very strife of trade and 
ambition is confession of this divinity; and successes in 
those fields are the poor amends, the fig-leaf 32 with 



178 ESSAYS 

which the shamed soul attempts to hide its nakedness. 
I find the like unwilling homage in all quarters. It is 
because we know how much is due from us that we 
are impatient to show some petty talent as a substi- 
tute for worth. We are haunted by a conscience 33 of 
this right to grandeur of character, and are false to it. 
But each of us has some talent, can do somewhat use- 
ful, or graceful, or formidable, or amusing, or lucra- 
tive. That we do, as an apology to others and to our- 
selves for not reaching the mark of a good and equal 
life. But it does not satisfy us, whilst we thrust it on 
the notice of our companions. It may throw dust in 
their eyes, but does not smooth our own brow, or give 
us the tranquillity of the strong when we walk abroad. 
We do penance as we go. Our talent is a sort of ex- 
piation, and we are constrained to reflect on our splen- 
did moment 34 with a certain humiliation, as somewhat 
too fine, and not as one act of many acts, a fair expres- 
sion of our permanent energy. Most persons of ability 
meet in society with a kind of tacit appeal. Each seems 
to say, 'I am not all here.' 35 Senators and presidents 
have climbed so high with pain enough, not because 
they think the place specially agreeable, but as an 
apology for real worth, and to vindicate their manhood 
in our eyes. This conspicuous chair is their compen- 
sation to themselves for being of a poor, cold, hard 
nature. They must do what they can. Like one class 
of forest animals, they have nothing but a prehensile 
tail; climb they must, or crawl. 36 If a man found him- 
self so rich-natured that he could enter into strict re- 
lations with the best persons and make life serene 
around him by the dignity and sweetness of his be- 
havior, could he afford to circumvent the favor of the 
caucus and the press, and covet relations so hollow 



POLITICS 179 

and pompous as those of a politician ? Surely nobody 
would be a charlatan who could afford to be sincere. 
The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self- 
government, and leave the individual, for all code, 37 to 
the rewards and penalties of his own constitution; 
which work with more energy than we believe whilst 
we depend on artificial restraints. The movement in 
this direction has been very marked in modern history. 
Much has been blind and discreditable, but the nature 
of the revolution is not affected by the vices of the re- 
volters; for this is a purely moral force. It was never 
adopted by any party in history, neither can be. It 
separates the individual from all party, and unites him 
at the same time to the race. It promises a recognition 
of higher rights than those of personal freedom, or the 
security of property. A man has a right to be employed, 
to be trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power of 
love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried. We 
must not imagine that all things are lapsing into con- 
fusion if every tender protestant be not compelled to 
bear his part in certain social conventions; nor doubt 
that roads can be built, letters carried, and the fruit 
of labor secured, when the government of force is at an 
end. Are our methods now so excellent that all com- 
petition is hopeless ? 38 could not a nation of friends 
even devise better ways ? On the other hand, let not 
the most conservative and timid fear anything from a 
premature surrender of the bayonet and the system of 
force. For, according to the order of nature, which is 
quite superior to our will, it stands thus; there will al- 
ways be a government of force where men are selfish; 
and when they are pure enough to abjure the code of 
force they will be wise enough to see how these public 
ends of the post-office, of the highway, or commerce 



180 ESSAYS 

and the exchange of property, of museums and libra- 
ries, of institutions of art and science can be answered. 
We live in a very low state of the world, and pay un- 
willing tribute to governments founded on force. There 
is not, among the most religious and instructed men 
of the most religious and civil nations, a reliance on the 
moral sentiment and a sufficient belief in the unity of 
things, to persuade them that society can be main- 
tained without artificial restraints, as well as the solar 
system; or that the private citizen might be reasonable 
and a good neighbor, without the hint of a jail or a 
confiscation. What is strange too, there never was in 
any man sufficient faith in the power of rectitude to 
inspire him with the broad design of renovating the 
State on the principle of right and love. All those 
who have pretended this design 39 have been partial 
reformers, and have admitted in some manner the su- 
premacy of the bad State. I do not call to mind a single 
human being who has steadily denied the authority of 
the laws, on the simple ground of his own moral na- 
ture. Such designs, full of genius and full of faith 40 as 
they are, are not entertained except avowedly as air- 
pictures. 41 If the individual who exhibits them dare to 
think them practicable, he disgusts scholars and church- 
men; and men of talent and women of superior sen- 
timents cannot hide their contempt. Not the less does 
nature continue to fill the heart of youth with sugges- 
tions of this enthusiasm, and there are now men, — if 
indeed I can speak in the plural number, — more ex- 
actly, I will say, I have just been conversing with one 
man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will 
make it for a moment appear impossible that thou- 
sands of human beings might exercise towards each 
other the grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as 
a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers. 



BEHAVIOR 

Grace, Beauty, and Caprice 

Build this golden portal, 

Graceful women, chosen men 

Dazzle every mortal: 

Their sweet and lofty countenance 

His enchanting food; 

He need not go to them, their forms 

Beset his solitude. 

He looketh seldom in their face, 

His eyes explore the ground, 

The green grass is a looking-glass 

Whereon their traits are found. 

Little he says to them, 

So dances his heart in his breast, 

Their tranquil mien bereaveth him 

Of wit, of words, of rest. 

Too weak to win, too fond to shun 

The tyrants or his doom, 

The much deceived Endymion 

Slips behind a tomb. 



BEHAVIOR 

The soul which animates nature is not less signifi- 
cantly published in the figure, movement and gesture 
of animated bodies, than in its last vehicle of articulate 
speech. This silent and subtile language is Manners; 
not what, but how. Life expresses. A statue has no 
tongue, and needs none. Good tableaux do not need 
declamation. Nature tells every secret once. Yes, but 
in man she tells it all the time, by form, attitude, ges- 
ture, mien, face and parts of the face, and by the whole 
action of the machine. The visible carriage or action 
of the individual, as resulting from his organization 
and his will combined, we call manners. What are 
they but thought entering the hands and feet, con- 
trolling the movements of the body, the speech and 
behavior ? 

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it 
be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy way of doing 
things; each, once a stroke of genius or of love, now 
repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last 
a rich varnish with which the routine of life is washed 
and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are 
the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morn- 
ing meadows. Manners are very communicable ; men 
catch them from each other. Consuelo, 1 in the romance, 
boasts of the lessons she had given the nobles in man- 
ners, on the stage; and in real life, Talma 2 taught 
Napoleon 3 the arts of behavior. Genius invents fine 
manners, which the baron and the baroness copy very 
fast, and, by the advantage of a palace, better the 



184 ESSAYS 

instruction. 4 They stereotype the lesson they have 
learned, into a mode. 

The power of manners is incessant, — an element 
as unconcealable as fire. The nobility cannot in any 
country be disguised, and no more in a republic or a 
democracy than in a kingdom. No man can resist 
their influence. There are certain manners which are 
learned in good society, of that force that if a person 
have them, he or she must be considered, and is every- 
where welcome, though without beauty, or wealth, or 
genius. Give a boy address and accomplishments and 
you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes 
where he goes. He has not the trouble of earning or 
owning them, they solicit him to enter and possess. 
We send girls of a timid, retreating disposition to the 
boarding-school, to the riding-school, to the ball-room, 
or wheresoever they can come into acquaintance and 
nearness of leading persons of their own sex; where 
they may learn address, and see it near at hand. The 
power of a woman of fashion to lead and also to daunt 
and repel, derives from their 5 belief that she knows 
resources and behaviors not known to them; but when 
these have mastered her secret they learn to confront 
her, and recover their self-possession. 

Every day bears witness to their gentle rule. People 
who would obtrude, now do not obtrude. The mediocre 
circle learns to demand that which belongs to a high 
state of nature or of culture. Your manners are always 
under examination, and by committees little sus- 
pected, a police in citizens' clothes, who are awarding 
or denying you very high prizes when you least think 
of it. 

We talk much of utilities, but 't is our manners that 
associate us. In hours of business we go to him who 



BEE A VI OR 185 

knows, or has, or does this or that which we want, and 
we do not let our taste or feeling stand in the way. But 
this activity over, we return to the indolent state, and 
wish for those we can be at ease with; those who will 
go where we go, whose manners do not offend us, whose 
social tone chimes with ours. When we reflect on their 
persuasive and cheering force ; 6 how they recommend, 
prepare, and draw people together; how, in all clubs, 
manners make the members; how manners make the 
fortune of the ambitious youth ; that, for the most part, 
his manners marry him, and, for the most part, he 
marries manners; when we think what keys they are, 
and to what secrets; what high lessons and inspiring 
tokens of character they convey, and what divination 
is required in us for the reading of this fine telegraph, 
— we see what range the subject has, and what rela- 
tions to convenience, power and beauty. 

Their first service is very low, — when they are the 
minor morals ; but 't is the beginning of civility, — to 
make us, I mean, endurable to each other. We prize 
them for their rough-plastic, abstergent force; to get 
people out of the quadruped state; to get them washed, 
clothed and set up on end ; to slough their animal husks 
and habits; compel them to be clean; overawe their 
spite and meanness; teach them to stifle the base and 
choose the generous expression, and make them know 
how much happier the generous behaviors are. 

Bad behavior the laws cannot reach. Society is in- 
fested with rude, cynical, restless and frivolous persons, 
who prey upon the rest, and whom a public opinion 
concentrated into good manners — forms accepted by 
the sense of all — can reach ; the contradictors and 
railers at public and private tables, who are like ter- 
riers, who conceive it the duty of a dog of honor to 



186 ESSAYS 

growl at any passer-by and do the honors of the house 
by barking him out of sight. I have seen men who 
neigh like a horse when you contradict them or say 
something which they do not understand: — then the 
overbold, who make their own invitation to your 
hearth; the persevering talker, who gives you his so- 
ciety in large saturating doses; the pitiers of them- 
selves, a perilous class; the frivolous Asmodeus, 7 who 
relies on you to find him in ropes of sand to twist; the 
monotones; in short, every stripe 8 of absurdity; — 
these are social inflictions which the magistrate can- 
not cure or defend you from, and which must be en- 
trusted to the restraining force of custom and proverbs 
and familiar rules of behavior impressed on young 
people in their school-days. 

In the hotels on the banks of the Mississippi they 
print, or used to print, among the rules of the house, 
that " No gentleman can be permitted to come to the 
public table without his coat ;' ' and in the same coun- 
try, in the pews of the churches little placards plead 
with the worshipper against the fury of expectoration. 
Charles Dickens self-sacrificingly undertook the re- 
formation of our American manners in unspeakable 
particulars. I think the lesson was not quite lost; that 
it held bad manners up, so that the churls could see 
the deformity. Unhappily the book had its own de- 
formities. It ought not to need to print in a reading- 
room a caution to strangers not to speak loud; nor to 
persons who look over fine engravings that they should 
be handled like cobwebs and butterflies' wings; nor to 
persons who look at marble statues that they shall not 
smite them with canes. But even in the perfect civi- 
lization of this city such cautions are not quite need- 
less in the Athenaeum 9 and City Library. 



BEHA VIOR 187 

Manners are factitious, and grow out of circum- 
stance as well as out of character. If you look at the 
pictures of patricians and of peasants of different 
periods and countries, you will see how well they 
match the same classes in our towns. The modern 
aristocrat not only is well drawn in Titian's 10 Venetian 
doges and. in Roman coins and statues, but also in the 
pictures which Commodore Perry brought home of 
dignitaries in Japan. Broad lands and great interests 
not only arrive to such heads as can manage them, 
but form manners of power. A keen eye too will see 
nice gradations of rank, or see in the manners the 
degree of homage the party is wont to receive. A 
prince who is accustomed every day to be courted 
and deferred to by the highest grandees, acquires a 
corresponding expectation and a becoming mode of 
receiving and replying to this homage. 

There are always exceptional people and modes. 
English grandees affect to be farmers. Claverhouse 11 
is a fop, and under the finish of dress and levity of 
behavior hides the terror of his war. But Nature and 
Destiny are honest, and never fail to leave their mark, 
to hang out a sign for each and for every quality. It 
is much to conquer one's face, and perhaps the ambi- 
tious youth thinks he has got the whole secret when 
he has learned that disengaged manners are command- 
ing. Don't be deceived by a facile exterior. Tender 
men sometimes have strong wills. We had in Massa- 
chusetts an old statesman who had sat all his life in 
courts and in chairs of state without overcoming an 
extreme irritability of face, voice and bearing; when 
he spoke, his voice would not serve him; it cracked, it 
broke, it wheezed, it piped; — little cared he; he knew 
that it had got to pipe, or wheeze, or screech his argu- 



188 ESSAYS 

ment and his indignation. When he sat down, after 
speaking, he seemed in a sort of fit, and held on to his 
chair with both hands: but underneath all this irrita- 
bility was a puissant will, firm and advancing, and a 
memory in which lay in order and method like geo- 
logic strata every fact of his history, and under the 
control of his will. 12 

Manners are partly factitious, but mainly there 
must be capacity for culture in the blood. Else all 
culture is vain. The obstinate prejudice in favor of 
blood, which lies at the base of the feudal and mon- 
archical fabrics of the Old World, has some reason in 
common experience. Every man — mathematician, 
artist, soldier or merchant — looks with confidence 
for some traits and talents in his own child which he 
would not dare to presume in the child of a stranger. 
The Orientalists are very orthodox on this point. 
"Take a thorn-bush," said the emir Abdel-Kader, 13 
"and sprinkle it for a whole year with rose-water; — 
it will yield nothing but thorns. Take a date-tree, 
leave it without water, without culture, and it will al- 
ways produce dates. Nobility is the date-tree and the 
Arab populace is a bush of thorns." 

A main fact in the history of manners is the won- 
derful expressiveness of the human body. If it were 
made of glass, or of air, and the thoughts were written 
on steel tablets within, it could not publish more truly 
its meaning than now. Wise men read very sharply all 
your private history in your look and gait and behavior. 
The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. 
The tell-tale body is all tongues. Men are like Geneva 
watches with crystal faces which expose the whole 
movement. They carry the liquor of life flowing up 
and down in these beautiful bottles and announcing 



BEHAVIOR 189 

to the curious how it is with them. The face and eyes 
reveal what the spirit is doing, how old it is, what aims 
it has. The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul, or 
through how many forms it has already ascended. It 
almost violates the proprieties if we say above the 
breath here what the confessing eyes do not hesitate to 
utter to every street passenger. 

Man cannot fix his eye on the sun, and so far seems 
imperfect. In Siberia a late traveller found men who 
could see the satellites of Jupiter with their unarmed 
eye. In some respects the animals excel us. The birds 
have a longer sight, beside the advantage by their 
wings of a higher observatory. A cow can bid her calf, 
by secret signal, probably of the eye, to run away or to 
lie down and hide itself. The jockeys say of certain 
horses that "they look over the whole ground." The 
out-door life and hunting and labor give equal vigor 
to the human eye. A farmer looks out at you as strong 
as the horse; his eye-beam is like the stroke of a staff. 
An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, or 
can insult like hissing or kicking; or in its altered mood 
by beams of kindness it can make the heart dance with 

The eye obeys exactly the action of the mind. When 
a thought strikes us, the eyes fix and remain gazing at 
a distance; in enumerating the names of persons or of 
countries, as France, Germany, Spain, Turkey, the 
eyes wink at each new name. There is no nicety of 
learning sought by the mind which the eyes do not vie 
in acquiring. " An artist," said Michael Angelo, " must 
have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the 
eye;" and there is no end to the catalogue of its per- 
formances, whether in indolent vision (that of health and 
beauty), or in strained vision (that of art and labor). 



190 ESSAYS 

Eyes are bold as lions, — roving, running, leaping, 
here and there, far and near. They speak all languages. 
They wait for no introduction; they are no English- 
men; ask no leave of age, or rank; they respect neither 
poverty nor riches, neither learning nor power nor 
virtue nor sex; but intrude, and come again, and go 
through and through you in a moment of time. What 
inundation of life and thought is discharged from one 
soul into another, through them ! The glance is natural 
magic. 14 The mysterious communication established 
across a house between two entire strangers, moves all 
the springs of wonder. The communication by the 
glance is in the greatest part not subject to the control 
of the will. It is the bodily symbol of identity of nature. 
We look into the eyes to know if this other form is 
another self, and the eyes will not lie, but make a faith- 
ful confession what inhabitant is there. The revela- 
tions are sometimes terrific. The confession of a low, 
usurping devil is there made, and the observer shall 
seem to feel the stirring of owls and bats and horned 
hoofs, where he looked for innocence and simplicity. 
'T is remarkable too that the spirit that appears at the 
windows of the house does at once invest himself in a 
new form of his own to the mind of the beholder. 

The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, 
with the advantage that the ocular dialect needs no 
dictionary, but is understood all the world over. When 
the eyes say one thing and the tongue another, a prac- 
tised man relies on the language of the first. If the man 
is off his centre, the eyes show it. You can read in the 
eyes of your companion whether your argument hits 
him, though his tongue will not confess it. There is a 
look by which a man shows he is going to say a good 
thing, and a look when he has said it. Vain and for- 



BEHA VIOR 191 

gotten are all the fine offers and offices of hospitality, 
if there is no holiday in the eye. How many furtive in- 
clinations avowed by the eye, though dissembled by 
the lips! One comes away from a company in which, 
it may easily happen, he has said nothing and no im- 
portant remark has been addressed to him, and yet, if 
in sympathy with the society, he shall not have a sense 
of this fact, such a stream of life has been flowing into 
him and out from him through the eyes. There are 
eyes, to be sure, that give no more admission into the 
man than blueberries. 15 Others are liquid and deep, — > 
wells that a man might fall into ; — others are aggres- 
sive and devouring, seem to call out the police, take all 
too much notice, and require crowded Broadways and 
the security of millions to protect individuals against 
them. The military eye I meet, now darkly sparkling 
under clerical, now under rustic brows. 'T is the city 
of Lacedaemon; 't is a stack of bayonets. There are 
asking eyes, asserting eyes, prowling eyes; and eyes 
full of fate, — some of good and some of sinister omen. 
The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity 
in beasts, is a power behind the eye. It must be a vic- 
tory achieved in the will, before it can be signified in 
the eye. It is very certain that each man carries in his 
eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense 
scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. 
A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his 
personal presence. Whoever looked on him would 
consent to his will, being certified that his aims were 
generous and universal. The reason why men do not 
obey us is because they see the mud at the bottom of 
our eye. 

If the organ of sight is such a vehicle of power, the 
other features have their own. A man finds room in 



192 ESSAYS 

the few square inches of the face for the traits of all 
his ancestors; for the expression of all his history and 
his wants. The sculptor and Winckelmann 16 and 
Lavater will tell you how significant a feature is the 
nose; how its forms express strength or weakness of 
will, and good or bad temper. The nose of Julius 
Caesar, of Dante, and of Pitt, suggest "the terrors of 
the beak." What refinement and what limitations the 
teeth betray! "Beware you don't laugh," said the 
wise mother, "for then you show all your faults." 

Balzac left in manuscript a chapter which he called 
" Theorie de la demarche" in which he says, " The 
look, the voice, the respiration, and the attitude or 
walk, are identical. But, as it has not been given to 
man the power to stand guard at once over these four 
different simultaneous expressions of his thought, 
watch that one which speaks out the truth, and you 
will know the whole man." 

Palaces interest us mainly in the exhibition of man- 
ners, which, in the idle and expensive society dwelling 
in them, are raised to a high art. The maxim of courts 
is that manner is power. A calm and resolute bearing, 
a polished speech, an embellishment of trifles, and the 
art of hiding all uncomfortable feeling, are essential 
to the courtier; and Saint Simon 17 and Cardinal de 
Retz and Rcederer and an encyclopaedia of Memoires 
will instruct you, if you wish, in those potent secrets. 
Thus it is a point of pride with kings to remember 
faces and names. It is reported of one prince that his 
head had the air of leaning downwards, in order not 
to humble the crowd. There are people who come in 
ever like a child with a piece of good news. It was said 
of the late Lord Holland 18 that he always came down 
to breakfast with the air of a man who had just met 



BEHAVIOR 193 

with some signal good fortune. In Notre Dame, 19 the 
grandee took his place on the dais with the look of one 
who is thinking of something else. But we must not 
peep and eavesdrop at palace doors. 

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in 
others. A scholar may be a well-bred man, or he may 
not. The enthusiast is introduced to polished scholars 
in society and is chilled and silenced by finding him- 
self not in their element. They all have somewhat 
which he has not, and, it seems, ought to have. But if 
he finds the scholar apart from his companions, it is 
then the enthusiast's turn, and the scholar has no de- 
fence, but must deal on his terms. Now they must 
fight the battle out on their private strength. What is 
the talent of that character so common — the success- 
ful man of the world — in all marts, senates and draw- 
ing-rooms? Manners: manners of power; sense to see 
his advantage, and manners up to it. See him approach 
his man. He knows that troops behave as they are 
handled at first ; that is his cheap secret ; just what hap- 
pens to every two persons who meet on any affair, — 
one instantly perceives that he has the key of the situa- 
tion, that his will comprehends the other's will, as the 
cat does the mouse ; and he has only to use courtesy and 
furnish good-natured reasons to his victim to cover up 
the chain, lest he be shamed into resistance. 

The theatre in which this science of manners has a 
formal importance is not with us a court, but dress- 
circles, wherein, after the close of the day's business, 
men and women meet at leisure, for mutual entertain- 
ment, in ornamented drawing-rooms. "Of course it has 
every variety of attraction and merit; but to earnest 
persons, to youths or maidens who have great objects 
at heart, we cannot extol it highly. A well-dressed 



194 ESSA YS 

talkative company where each is bent to amuse the 
other, — yet the high-born Turk who came hither 
fancied that every woman seemed to be suffering for a 
chair; that all the talkers were brained and exhausted 
by the deoxygenated air; it spoiled the best persons; it 
put all on stilts. Yet here are the secret biographies 
written and read. The aspect of that man is repulsive; 
I do not wish to deal with him. The other is irritable, 
shy and on his guard. The youth looks humble and 
manly; I choose him. Look on this woman. There is 
not beauty, nor brilliant sayings, nor distinguished 
power to serve you; but all see her gladly; her whole 
air and impression are healthful. Here come the sen- 
timentalists, and the invalids. Here is Elise, who 
caught cold in coming into the world and has always 
increased it since. Here are creep-mouse manners, 
and thievish manners. "Look at Northcote," 20 said 
Fuseli; 21 "he looks like a rat that has seen a cat." In 
the shallow company, easily excited, easily tired, here 
is the columnar Bernard; the Alleghanies do not ex- 
press more repose than his behavior. Here are the 
sweet following eyes of Cecile; it seemed always that 
she demanded the heart. Nothing can be more excel- 
lent in kind than the Corinthian grace of Gertrude's 
manners, and yet Blanche, who has no manners, has 
better manners than she ; for the movements of Blanche 
are the sallies of a spirit which is sufficient for the mo- 
ment, and she can afford to express every thought by 
instant action. 

Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to 
be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance. 
Fashion is shrewd to detect those who do not belong 
to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions. Society 
is very swift in its instincts, and, if you do not belong 



BEHAVIOR 195 

to it, resists and sneers at you, or quietly drops you. 
The first weapon enrages the party attacked ; the sec- 
ond is still more effective, but is not to be resisted, as 
the date of the transaction is not easily found. People 
grow up and grow old under this infliction, and never 
suspect the truth, ascribing the solitude which acts on 
them very injuriously to any cause but the right one. 

The basis of good manners is self-reliance. Neces- 
sity is the law of all who are not self-possessed. Those 
who are not self-possessed obtrude and pain us. Some 
men appear to feel that they belong to a Pariah 22 caste. 
They fear to offend, they bend and apologize, and walk 
through life with a timid step. As we sometimes dream 
that we are in a well-dressed company without any 
coat, so Godfrey acts ever as if he suffered from some 
mortifying circumstance. The hero should find him- 
self at home, wherever he is ; should impart comfort by 
his own security and good nature to all beholders. The 
hero is suffered to be himself. A person of strong mind 
comes to perceive that for him an immunity is secured 
so long as he renders to society that service which is 
native and proper to him, — an immunity from all the 
observances, yea, and duties, which society so tyran- 
nically imposes on the rank and file of its members. 
" Euripides," says Aspasia, 23 " has not the fine manners 
of Sophocles; but," she adds good-humoredly," the 
movers and masters of our souls have surely a right to 
throw out their limbs as carelessly as they please, on 
the world that belongs to them, and before the crea- 
tures they have animated." 24 

Manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar 
than haste. Friendship should be surrounded with 
ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners. 
Friendship requires more time than poor busy men 



196 ESSAYS 

can usually command. Here comes to me Roland, 
with a delicacy of sentiment leading and enwrapping 
him like a divine cloud or holy ghost. 'T is a great 
destitution to both that this should not be entertained 
with large leisures, but contrariwise should be balked 
by importunate affairs. 

But through this lustrous varnish the reality is ever 
shining. 25 'T is hard to keep the what from break- 
ing through this pretty painting of the how. The core 
will come to the surface. Strong will and keen percep- 
tion overpower old manners and create new; and the 
thought of the present moment has a greater value 
than all the past. In persons of character we do not 
remark manners, because of their instantaneousness. 
We are surprised by the thing done, out of all power 
to watch the way of it. Yet nothing is more charming 
than to recognize the great style which runs through 
the actions of such. People masquerade before us in 
their fortunes, titles, offices, and connections, as aca- 
demic or civil presidents, or senators, or professors, 
or great lawyers, and impose on the frivolous, and a 
good deal on each other, by these fames. At least it is 
a point of prudent good manners to treat these repu- 
tations tenderly, as if they were merited. But the 
sad realist knows these fellows at a glance, and they 
know him; as when in Paris the chief of the police 
enters a ball-room, so many diamonded pretenders 
shrink and make themselves as inconspicuous as they 
can, or give him a supplicating look as they pass. u I 
had received," said a sibyl, "I had received at birth 
the fatal gift of penetration;" and these Cassandras 
are always born. 26 

Manners impress as they indicate real power. A 
man who is sure of his point, carries a broad and con- 



BEHAVIOR 197 

tented expression, which everybody reads. And you 
cannot rightly train one to an air and manner, except 
by making him the kind of man of whom that manner 
is the natural expression. Nature forever puts a pre- 
mium on reality. What is done for effect is seen to be 
done for effect; what is done for love is felt to be done 
for love. A man inspires affection and honor because 
he was not lying in wait for these. 27 The things of a 
man for which we visit him were done in the dark and 
cold. A little integrity is better than any career. So 
deep are the sources of this surface-action that even the 
size of your companion seems to vary with his freedom 
of thought. Not only is he larger, when at ease and 
his thoughts generous, but everything around him be- 
comes variable with expression. No carpenter's rule, 
no rod and chain will measure the dimensions of any 
house or house-lot ; go into the house ; if the proprietor 
is constrained and deferring, 't is of no importance 
how large his house, how beautiful his grounds, 28 — 
you quickly come to the end of all: but if the man is 
self-possessed, happy and at home, his house is deep- 
founded, indefinitely large and interesting, the roof 
and dome buoyant as the sky. Under the humblest 
roof, the commonest person in plain clothes sits there 
massive, cheerful, yet formidable, like the Egyptian 
colossi. 

Neither Aristotle, nor Leibnitz, nor Junius, 29 nor 
Champollion 30 has set down the grammar-rules of this 
dialect, older than Sanscrit; but they who cannot yet 
read English, can read this. Men take each other's 
measure, when they meet for the first time, — and 
every time they meet. How do they get this rapid 
knowledge, even before they speak, of each other's 
power and disposition ? One would say that the per- 



198 ESSAYS 

suasion of their speech is not in what they say, — or 
that men do not convince by their argument, but by 
their personality, by who they are, and what they said 
and did heretofore. A man already strong is listened 
to, and everything he says is applauded. Another op- 
poses him with sound argument, but the argument is 
scouted until by and by it gets into the mind of some 
weighty person ; then it begins to tell on the community. 

Self-reliance is the basis of behavior, as it is the 
guaranty that the powers are not squandered in too 
much demonstration. In this country, where school 
education is universal, we have a superficial culture, 
and a profusion of reading and writing and expression. 
We parade our nobilities in poems and orations, in- 
stead of working them up into happiness. There is a 
whisper out of the ages to him who can understand it, 
— "Whatever is known to thyself alone, has always 
very great value." There is some reason to believe 
that when a man does not write his poetry it escapes 
by other vents through him, instead of the one vent of 
writing; clings to his form and manners, whilst poets 
have often nothing poetical about them except their 
verses. Jacobi 31 said that " when a man has fully ex- 
pressed his thought, he has somewhat less possession 
of it." One would say, the rule is, — What man is 
irresistibly urged to say, helps him and us. In explain- 
ing his thought to others, he explains it to himself, but 
when he opens it for show, it corrupts him. 

Society is the stage on which manners are shown; 
novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or 
record of manners, and the new importance of these 
books derives from the fact that the novelist begins to 
penetrate the surface and treat this part of life more 
worthily. The novels used to be all alike, and had a 



BEE A VI OR 199 

quite vulgar tone. The novels used to lead us on to a 
foolish interest in the fortunes of the boy and girl they 
described. The boy was to be raised from a humble 
to a high position. He was in want of a wife and a 
castle, and the object of the story was to supply him 
with one or both. We watched sympathetically, step 
by step, his climbing, until at last the point is gained, 
the wedding day is fixed, and we follow the gala pro- 
cession home to the bannered portal, when the doors 
are slammed in our face and the poor reader is left 
outside in the cold, not enriched by so much as an idea 
or a virtuous impulse. 

But the victories of character are instant, and vic- 
tories for all. Its greatness enlarges all. We are 
fortified by every heroic anecdote. The novels are as 
useful as Bibles if they teach you the secret that the 
best of life is conversation, and the greatest success is 
confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere 
people. 'T is a French definition of friendship, rien 
que s'entendre, good understanding. The highest com- 
pact we can make with our fellow, is, — ' Let there be 
truth between us two forevermore.' That is the charm 
in all good novels, as it is the charm in all good his- 
tories, that the heroes mutually understand, from the 
first, and deal loyally and with a profound trust in each 
other. It is sublime to feel and say of another, I need 
never meet or speak or write to him; we need not re- 
inforce ourselves, or send tokens of remembrance; I 
rely on him as on myself; if he did thus or thus, I know 
it was right. 

In all the superior people I have met I notice direct- 
ness, truth spoken more truly, as if everything of 
obstruction, of malformation, had been trained away. 
What have they to conceal? What have they to ex- 



200 ESSAYS 

hibit? Between simple and noble persons there is al- 
ways a quick intelligence; they recognize at sight, and 
meet on a better ground than the talents and skills they 
may chance to possess, namely on sincerity and up- 
rightness. For it is not what talents or genius a man 
has, but how he is to his talents, that constitutes friend- 
ship and character. The man that stands by himself, 
the universe stands by him also. It is related by the 
monk Basle, 32 that being excommunicated by the Pope, 
he was, at his death, sent in charge of an angel to find 
a fit place of suffering in hell; but such was the elo- 
quence and good humor of the monk, that wherever 
he went he was received gladly and civilly treated even 
by the most uncivil angels; and when he came to dis- 
course with them, instead of contradicting or forcing 
him, they took his part, and adopted his manners ; and 
even good angels came from far to see him and take 
up their abode with him. The angel that was sent to 
find a place of torment for him attempted to remove 
him to a worse pit, but with no better success ; for such 
was the contented spirit of the monk that he found 
something to praise in every place and company, 
though in hell, and made a kind of heaven of it. At 
last the escorting angel returned with his prisoner to 
them that sent him, saying that no phlegethon could 
be found that would burn him; for that in whatever 
condition, Basle remained incorrigibly Basle. The 
legend says his sentence was remitted, and he was 
allowed to go into heaven and was canonized as a saint. 
There is a stroke of magnanimity in the correspon- 
dence of Bonaparte with his brother Joseph, when the 
latter was King of Spain, and complained that he 
missed in Napoleon's letters the affectionate tone 
which had marked their childish correspondence. "I 



BEHAVIOR 201 

am sorry," replies Napoleon, "you think you shall 
find your brother again only in the Elysian Fields. It 
is natural that at forty he should not feel toward you 
as he did at twelve. But his feelings toward you have 
greater truth and strength. His friendship has the 
features of his mind." 

How much we forgive to those who yield us the rare 
spectacle of heroic manners ! We will pardon them the 
want of books, of arts, and even of the gentler virtues. 
How tenaciously we remember them ! Here is a lesson 
which I brought along with me in boyhood from the 
Latin School, and which ranks with the best of Roman 
anecdotes. Marcus Scaurus was accused by Quintus 
Varius Hispanus, that he had excited the allies to take 
arms against the Republic. But he, full of firmness 
and gravity, defended himself in this manner: — 
" Quintus Varius Hispanus alleges that Marcus Scau- 
rus, President of the Senate, excited the allies to arms : 
Marcus Scaurus, President of the Senate, denies it. 
There is no witness. Which do you believe, Romans ? " 
"Utri creditis, Quirites?" When he had said these 
words he was absolved by the assembly of the people. 

I have seen manners that make a similar impression 
with personal beauty; 33 that give the like exhilaration, 
and refine us like that; and in memorable experiences 
they are suddenly better than beauty, and make that 
superfluous and ugly. But they must be marked by 
fine perception, the acquaintance with real beauty. 
They must always show self-control; you shall not be 
facile, apologetic, or leaky, but king over your word; 
and every gesture and action shall indicate power at 
rest. 34 Then they must be inspired by the good heart. 
There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or be- 
havior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around 



202 ESSAYS 

us. It is good to give a stranger a meal, or a night's 
lodging. It is better to be hospitable to his good mean- 
ing and thought, and give courage to a companion. 35 
We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a pic- 
ture, 36 which we are willing to give the advantage of a 
good light. Special precepts are not to be thought of; 
the talent of well-doing contains them all. Every hour 
will show a duty as paramount as that of my whim 
just now, and yet I will write it, — that there is one 
topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all 
rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you 
have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have head- 
ache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunderstroke, I be- 
seech you by all angels to hold your peace, and not 
pollute the morning, to which all the housemates bring 
serene and pleasant thoughts, by corruption and 
groans. Come out of the azure. Love the day. Do not 
leave the sky out of your landscape. The oldest and 
the most deserving person should come very modestly 
into any newly awaked company, respecting the divine 
communications out of which all must be presumed 
to have newly come. An old man who added an ele- 
vating culture to a large experience of life, said to me, 
"When you come into the room, I think I will study 
how to make humanity beautiful to you.'" 37 

As respects the delicate question of culture I do not 
think that any other than negative rules can be laid 
down. For positive rules, for suggestion, nature alone 
inspires it. Who dare assume to guide a youth, a maid, 
to perfect manners? the golden mean is so delicate, 
difficult, — say frankly, unattainable. What finest 
hands would not be clumsy to sketch the genial pre- 
cepts of the young girl's demeanor? The chances 
seem infinite against success; and yet success is con- 



BEHA VIOR 203 

tinually attained. There must not be secondariness, 
and 't is a thousand to one that her air and manner 
will at once betray that she is not primary, but that 
there is some other one or many of her class to whom 
she habitually postpones herself. But nature lifts her 
easily and without knowing it over these impossibili- 
ties, and we are continually surprised with graces and 
felicities not only unteachable but undescribable. 38 



MANNERS 

How near to good is what is fair! 

Which we no sooner see, 
But with the lines and outward air 

Out senses taken be." 

" Again yourselves compose, 
And now put all the aptness on 
Of Figure, that Proportion 

Or Color can disclose; 
That if those silent arts were lost, 
Design and Picture, they might boast 

From you a newer ground, 
Instructed by the heightening sense 
Of dignity and reverence 

In their true motions found." 

Ben Jonson. 



MANNERS 

Half the world, it is said, knows not how the other 
half live. Our Exploring Expedition saw the Feejee 
islanders getting their dinner off human bones; and 
they are said to eat their own wives and children. The 
husbandry of the modern inhabitants of Gournou (west 
of old Thebes) is philosophical * to a fault. To set up 
their housekeeping nothing is requisite but two or 
three earthen pots, a stone to grind meal, and a mat 
which is the bed. The house, namely a tomb, is ready 
without rent or taxes. No rain can pass through the 
roof, and there is no door, for there is no want of one, 
as there is nothing to lose. If the house do not please 
them, they walk out and enter another, as there are 
several hundreds at their command. "It is somewhat 
singular," adds Belzoni, 2 to whom we owe this account, 
" to talk of happiness among people who live in sepul- 
chres, among the corpses and rags of an ancient nation 
which they know nothing of." In the deserts of Borgoo 3 
the rock-Tibboos 4 still dwell in caves, like cliff-swal- 
lows, and the language of these negroes is compared 
by their neighbors to the shrieking of bats and to the 
whistling of birds. Again, the Bornoos 5 have no proper 
names; individuals are called after their height, thick- 
ness, or other accidental quality, and have nicknames 
merely. But the salt, the dates, the ivory, and the gold, 
for which these horrible regions are visited, find their 
way into countries where the purchaser and consumer 
can hardly be ranked in one race with these cannibals 



208 ESSAYS 

and man-stealers ; countries where man serves himself 
with metals, wood, stone, glass, gum, cotton, silk and 
wool; honors himself with architecture; 6 writes laws, 
and contrives to execute his will through the hands of 
many nations; and, especially, establishes a select so- 
ciety, running through all the countries of intelligent 
men, a self-constituted aristocracy, or fraternity of the 
best, which, without written law or exact usage of any 
kind, perpetuates itself, colonizes every new-planted 
island and adopts and makes its own whatever 
personal beauty or extraordinary native endowment 
anywhere appears. 

What fact more conspicuous in modern history than 
the creation of the gentleman ? Chivalry is that, and 
loyalty is that, and in English literature half the drama, 
and all the novels, from Sir Philip Sidney to Sir Walter 
Scott, paint this figure. The word gentleman, which, 
like the word Christian, must hereafter characterize 
the present and the few preceding centuries by the im- 
portance attached to it, is a homage to personal and 
incommunicable properties. Frivolous and fantastic 
additions have got associated with the name, but the 
steady interest of mankind in it must be attributed 
to the valuable properties which it designates. An ele- 
ment which unites all the most forcible persons of 
every country, makes them intelligible and agreeable 
to each other, and is somewhat so precise that it is at 
once felt if an individual lack the masonic sign, — can- 
not be any casual product, but must be an average 
result of the character and faculties universally found 
in men. It seems a certain permanent average; as the 
atmosphere is a permanent composition, whilst so 
many gases are combined only to be decompounded. 
Comme ilfaut, is the Frenchman's description of good 



MANNERS 209 

society: as we must be. 1 It is a spontaneous fruit of 
talents and feelings of precisely that class who have 
most vigor, who take the lead in the world of this hour, 
and though far from pure, far from constituting the 
gladdest and highest tone of human feeling, it is as 
good as the whole society permits it to be. It is made 
of the spirit, more than of the talent of men, and is a 
compound result into which every great force enters 
as an ingredient, namely virtue, wit, beauty, wealth 
and power. 

There is something equivocal in all the words in use 
to express the excellence of manners and social culti- 
vation, because the quantities are fluxional, and the 
last effect is assumed by the senses as the cause. The 
word gentleman has not any correlative abstract to ex- 
press the quality. Gentility is mean, and gentilesse 8 is 
obsolete. But we must keep alive in the vernacular 
the distinction between fashion f a word of narrow and 
often sinister meaning, and the heroic character which 
the gentleman imports. The usual words, however, 
must be respected; they will be found to contain the 
root of the matter. The point of distinction in all this 
class of names, as courtesy, chivalry, fashion, and the 
like, is that the flower and fruit, not the grain of the 
tree, are contemplated. It is beauty which is the aim 
this time, and not worth. 9 The result is now in ques- 
tion, although our words intimate well enough the 
popular feeling that the appearance supposes a sub- 
stance. The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his 
own actions, and expressing that lordship in his be- 
havior; not in any manner dependent and servile, 
either on persons, or opinions, or possessions. Beyond 
this fact of truth and real force, the word denotes good- 
nature or benevolence : manhood first, and then gentle- 



210 ESSA YS 

ness. The popular notion certainly adds a condition 
of ease and fortune ; but that is a natural result of per- 
sonal force and love, that they should possess and dis- 
pense the goods of the world. In times of violence, 
every eminent person must fall in with many oppor- 
tunities to approve his stoutness and worth; therefore 
every man's name that emerged at all from the mass 
in the feudal ages rattles in our ear like a flourish of 
trumpets. But personal force never goes out of fash- 
ion. That is still paramount to-day, and in the moving 
crowd of good society the men of valor and reality are 
known and rise to their natural place. The competi- 
tion is transferred from war to politics and trade, but 
the personal force appears readily enough in these 
new arenas. 

Power first, or no leading class. In politics and in 
trade, bruisers and pirates are of better promise than 
talkers and clerks. God knows that all sorts of gentle- 
men knock at the door; but whenever used in strictness 
and with any emphasis, the name will be found to point 
at original energy. It describes a man standing in his 
own right and working after untaught methods. In a 
good lord there must first be a good animal, 10 at least 
to the extent of yielding the incomparable advantage 
of animal spirits. The ruling class must have more, 
but they must have these, giving in every company the 
sense of power, which makes things easy to be done 
which daunt the wise. The society of the energetic 
class, in their friendly and festive meetings, is full of 
courage and of attempts which intimidate the pale 
scholar. The courage which girls exhibit is like a battle 
of Lundy's Lane, 11 or a sea-fight. The intellect relies 
on memory to make some supplies to face these ex- 
temporaneous squadrons. But memory is a base men- 



MANNERS 211 

dicant with basket and badge, in the presence of these 
sudden masters. The rulers of society must be up to 
the work of the world, and equal to their versatile 
office: men of the right Caesarian pattern, who have 
great range of affinity. I am far from believing the 
timid maxim of Lord Falkland 12 (" that for ceremony 
there must go two to it; since a bold fellow will go 
through the cunningest forms"), and am of opinion 
that the gentleman is the bold fellow whose forms are 
not to be broken through; and only that plenteous 
nature is rightful master which is the complement of 
whatever person it converses with. My gentleman 
gives the law where he is; he will outpray saints in 
chapel, outgeneral veterans in the field, and outshine 
all courtesy in the hall. He is good company for pirates 
and good with academicians; so that it is useless to 
fortify yourself against him; he has the private en- 
trance to all minds, and I could as easily exclude my- 
self, as him. The famous gentlemen of Asia and Europe 
have been of this strong type; Saladin, Sapor, 13 the 
Cid, 14 Julius Caesar, Scipio, Alexander, Pericles, and 
the lordliest personages. They sat very carelessly in 
their chairs, and were too excellent themselves, to 
value any condition at a high rate. 

A plentiful fortune is reckoned necessary, in the 
popular judgment, to the completion of this man of 
the world; and it is a material deputy which walks 
through the dance which the first has led. Money is 
not essential, but this wide affinity is, which transcends 
the habits of clique and caste and makes itself felt by 
men of all classes. If the aristocrat is only valid in 
fashionable circles and not with truckmen, he will 
never be a leader in fashion; and if the man of the 
people cannot speak on equal terms with the gentle- 



212 ESSAYS 

man, so that the gentleman shall perceive that he is 
already really of his own order, he is not to be feared. 
Diogenes, Socrates, and Epaminondas, are gentlemen 
of the best blood who have chosen the condition of 
poverty when that of wealth was equally open to them. 
I use these old names, but the men I speak of are my 
contemporaries. 15 Fortune will not supply to every 
generation one of these well-appointed knights, but 
every collection of men furnishes some example of the 
class ; and the politics of this country, and the trade of 
every town, are controlled by these hardy and irre- 
sponsible doers, who have invention to take the lead, 
and a broad sympathy which puts them in fellowship 
with crowds, and makes their action popular. 

The manners of this class are observed and caught 
with devotion by men of taste. The association of 
these masters with each other and with men intelligent 
of their merits, is mutually agreeable and stimulating. 
The good forms, the happiest expressions of each, are 
repeated and adopted. By swift consent everything 
superfluous is dropped, everything graceful is renewed. 
Fine manners show themselves formidable to the uncul- 
tivated man. They are a subtler science of defence to 
parry and intimidate; but once matched by the skill 
of the other party, they drop the point of the sword, — 
points and fences disappear, 16 and the youth finds 
himself in a more transparent atmosphere, wherein 
life is a less troublesome game, and not a misunder- 
standing rises between the players. Manners aim to 
facilitate life, to get rid of impediments and bring the 
man pure to energize. 17 They aid our dealing and 
conversation as a railway aids travelling, by getting 
rid of all avoidable obstructions of the road and leav- 
ing nothing to be conquered but pure space. 18 These 



MANNERS 213 

forms very soon become fixed, and a fine sense of pro- 
priety is cultivated with the more heed that it becomes 
a badge of social and civil distinctions. Thus grows up 
Fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, 
the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and fol- 
lowed, and which morals 19 and violence assault in vain. 
There exists a strict relation between the class of 
power and the exclusive and polished circles. The last 
are always filled or filling from the first. The strong 
men usually give some allowance even to the petulances 
of fashion, for that affinity they find in it. Napoleon, 
child of the revolution, destroyer of the old noblesse, 
never ceased to court the Faubourg St. Germain; 20 
doubtless with the feeling that fashion is a homage to 
men of his stamp. Fashion, though in a strange way, 
represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: 
it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often 
caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a 
hall of the Past. It usually sets its face against the 
great of this hour. Great men are not commonly in its 
halls; they are absent in the field: they are working, 
not triumphing. Fashion is made up of their children; 
of those who through the value and virtue of some- 
body, have acquired lustre to their name, marks of 
distinction, means of cultivation and generosity, and 
in their physical organization a certain health and ex- 
cellence which secure to them, if not the highest power 
to work, yet high power to enjoy. The class of power, 
the working heroes, the Cortez, the Nelson, the Na- 
poleon, see that this is the festivity and permanent 
celebration of such as they; that fashion is funded 
talent; is Mexico, Marengo 21 and Trafalgar 22 beaten 
out thin; that the brilliant names of fashion run back 
to just such busy names as their own, fifty or sixty 



214 ESSAYS 

years ago. They are the sowers, their sons shall be the 
reapers, and their sons, in the ordinary course of things, 
must yield the possession of the harvest to new com- 
petitors with keener eyes and stronger frames. The 
city is recruited from the country. In the year 1805, it 
is said, every legitimate monarch in Europe was im- 
becile. The city would have died out, rotted and ex- 
ploded, long ago, but that it was reinforced from the 
fields. It is only country which came to town day be- 
fore yesterday that is city and court to-day. 23 

Aristocracy and fashion are certain inevitable re- 
sults. These mutual selections are indestructible. If 
they provoke anger in the least favored class, and the 
excluded majority revenge themselves on the exclud- 
ing minority by the strong hand and kill them, at once 
a new class finds itself at the top, as certainly as cream 
rises in a bowl of milk : and if the people should de- 
stroy class after class, until two men only were left, 
one of these would be the leader and would be invol- 
untarily served and copied by the other. You may 
keep this minority out of sight and out of mind, but it 
is tenacious of life, and is one of the estates of the realm. 
I am the more struck with this tenacity, when I see its 
work. It respects the administration of such unim- 
portant matters, that we should not look for any dura- 
bility in its rule. We sometimes meet men under some 
strong moral influence, as a patriotic, a literary, a re- 
ligious movement, and feel that the moral sentiment 
rules man and nature. We think all other distinctions 
and ties will be slight and fugitive, this of caste or 
fashion for example; yet come from year to year and 
see how permanent that is, in this Boston or New York 
life of man, where too it has not the least countenance 
from the law of the land. Not in Egypt or in India a 



MANNERS 215 

firmer or more impassable line. Here are associations 
whose ties go over and under and through it, a meeting 
of merchants, a military corps, a college class, a fire- 
club, a professional association, a political, a religious 
convention ; — the persons seem to draw inseparably 
near; yet, that assembly once dispersed, its members 
will not in the year meet again. Each returns to his 
degree in the scale of good society, porcelain remains 
porcelain, and earthen earthen. The objects of fashion 
may be frivolous, or fashion may be objectless, but the 
nature of this union and selection can be neither frivo- 
lous nor accidental. Each man's rank in that perfect 
graduation depends on some symmetry in his structure 
or some agreement in his structure to the symmetry of 
society. Its doors unbar instantaneously to a natural 
claim of their own kind. A natural gentleman finds 
his way in, and will keep the oldest patrician out who 
has lost his intrinsic rank. Fashion understands itself; 
good-breeding and personal superiority of whatever 
country readily fraternize with those of every other. 
The chiefs of savage tribes have distinguished them- 
selves in London and Paris by the purity of their 
tournure. 24 

To say what good of fashion we can, it rests on real- 
ity, and hates nothing so much as pretenders; to ex- 
clude and mystify pretenders and send them into ever- 
lasting ' Coventry,' 25 is its delight. We contemn in 
turn every other gift of men of the world ; but the habit 
even in little and the least matters of not appealing to 
any but our own sense of propriety, constitutes the 
foundation of all chivalry. There is almost no kind of 
self-reliance, so it be sane and proportioned, which 
fashion does not occasionally adopt and give it the 
freedom of its saloons. A sainted soul is always ele- 



216 ESSAYS 

gant, and, if it will, passes unchallenged into the most 
guarded ring. But so will Jock the teamster pass, in 
some crisis that brings him thither, and find favor, as 
long as his head is not giddy with the new circum- 
stance, and the iron shoes do not wish to dance in 
waltzes and cotillons. For there is nothing settled in 
manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the energy 
of the individual. The maiden at her first ball, the 
countryman at a city dinner, believes that there is a 
ritual according to which every act and compliment 
must be performed, or the failing party must be cast 
out of this presence. Later they learn that good sense 
and character make their own forms every moment, 
and speak or abstain, take wine or refuse it, stay or go, 
sit in a chair or sprawl with children on the floor, or 
stand on their head, or what else soever, in a new and 
aboriginal way; and that strong will is always in fash- 
ion, let who. will be unfashionable. All that fashion 
demands is composure and self-content. A circle of 
men perfectly well-bred would be a company of sensi- 
ble persons in which every man's native manners and 
character appeared. If the fashionist 26 have not this 
quality, he is nothing. We are such lovers of self- 
reliance that we excuse in a man many sins if he will 
show us a complete satisfaction in his position, which 
asks no leave to be, of mine, or any man's good opinion. 
But any deference to some eminent man or woman of 
the world, forfeits all privilege of nobility. He is an 
underling : I have nothing to do with him ; I will speak 
with his master. A man should not go where he can- 
not carry his whole sphere or society with him, — not 
bodily, the whole circle of his friends, but atmospheric- 
ally. He should preserve in a new company the same 
attitude of mind and reality of relation which his daily 



MANNERS 217 

associates draw him to, else he is shorn of his best 
beams, and will be an orphan in the merriest club. 
" If you could see Vich Ian Vohr 27 with his tail on ! — " 
But Vich Ian Vohr must always carry his belongings 
in some fashion, if not added as honor, then severed as 
disgrace. 

There will always be in society certain persons who 
are mercuries of its approbation, and whose glance 
will at any time determine for the curious their stand- 
ing in the world. These are the chamberlains of the 
lesser gods. 28 Accept their coldness as an omen of 
grace with the loftier deities, and allow them all their 
privilege. They are clear in their office, nor could they 
be thus formidable without their own merits. But do 
not measure the importance of this class by their pre- 
tension, or imagine that a fop can be the dispenser of 
honor and shame. They pass also at their just rate; 
for how can they otherwise, in circles which exist as a 
sort of herald's office for the sifting of character ? 

As the first thing man requires of man is reality, so 
that appears in all the forms of society. We pointedly, 
and by name, introduce the parties to each other. 
Know you before all heaven and earth, that this is 
Andrew, and this is Gregory, — they look each other 
in the eye; they grasp each other's hand, to identify 
and signalize each other. It is a great satisfaction. A 
gentleman never dodges ; his eyes look straight forward, 
and he assures the other party, first of all, that he has 
been met. For what is it that we seek, in so many 
visits and hospitalities ? Is it your draperies, pictures 
and decorations ? Or do we not insatiably ask, Was a 
man in the house ? I may easily go into a great house- 
hold where there is much substance, excellent provis- 
ion for comfort, luxury and taste, and yet not encounter 



218 ESSA YS 

there any Amphitryon 29 who shall subordinate these 
appendages. I may go into a cottage, and find a farmer 
who feels that he is the man I have come to see, and 
fronts me accordingly. It was therefore a very natural 
point of old feudal etiquette that a gentleman who re- 
ceived a visit, though it were of his sovereign, should 
not leave his roof, but should wait his arrival at the 
door of his house. No house, though it were the Tuil- 
eries or the Escurial, is good for anything without a 
master. And yet we are not often gratified by this 
hospitality. Everybody we know surrounds himself 
with a fine house, fine books, conservatory, gardens, 
equipage and all manner of toys, as screens to inter- 
pose between himself and his guest. Does it not seem 
as if man was of a very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded 
nothing so much as a full rencontre front to front with 
his fellow ? It were unmerciful, I know, quite to abolish 
the use of these screens, which are of eminent conven- 
ience, whether the guest is too great or too little. We 
call together many friends who keep each other in play, 
or by luxuries and ornaments we amuse the young 
people, and guard our retirement. Or if perchance a 
searching realist comes to our gate, before whose eye 
we have no care to stand, then again we run to our 
curtain, and hide ourselves as Adam at the voice of the 
Lord God in the garden. Cardinal Caprara, the Pope's 
legate at Paris, defended himself from the glances of 
Napoleon by an immense pair of green spectacles. 
Napoleon remarked them, and speedily managed to 
rally them off: and yet Napoleon, in his turn, was not 
great enough, with eight hundred thousand troops at 
his back, to face a pair of freeborn eyes, but fenced 
himself with etiquette and within triple barriers of 
reserve; and, as all the world knows from Madame de 



MANNERS 219 

Stael, was wont, when he found himself observed, to 
discharge his face of all expression. But emperors and 
rich men are by no means the most skilful masters of 
good manners. No rent-roll nor army-list can dignify 
skulking and dissimulation; and the first point of 
courtesy must always be truth, as really all the forms 
of good-breeding point that way. 

I have just been reading, in Mr. Hazlitt's translation, 
Montaigne's account of his journey into Italy, and 
am struck with nothing more agreeably than the self- 
respecting fashions of the time. His arrival in each 
place, the arrival of a gentleman of France, is an event 
of some consequence. Wherever he goes he pays a 
visit to whatever prince or gentleman of note resides 
upon his road, as a duty to himself and to civilization. 
When he leaves any house in which he has lodged for 
a few weeks, he causes his arms to be painted and 
hung up as a perpetual sign to the house, as was the 
custom of gentlemen. 

The complement of this graceful self-respect, and 
that of all the points of good-breeding I most require 
and insist upon, is deference. I like that every chair 30 
should be a throne, and hold a king. I prefer a ten- 
dency to stateliness to an excess of fellowship. Let the 
incommunicable objects of nature and the metaphysical 
isolation of man teach us independence. Let us not be 
too much acquainted. I would have a man enter his 
house through a hall filled with heroic and sacred 
sculptures, that he might not want the hint of tran- 
quillity and self-poise. We should meet each morning 
as from foreign countries, and, spending the day to- 
gether, should depart at night, as into foreign coun- 
tries. In all things I would have the island of a man 
inviolate. Let us sit apart as the gods, talking from 



220 ESSAYS 

peak to peak all round Olympus. No degree of affec- 
tion need invade this religion. This is myrrh and rose- 
mary to keep the other sweet. Lovers should guard 
their strangeness. 31 If they forgive too much, all slides 
into confusion and meanness. It is easy to push this 
deference to a Chinese etiquette; but coolness and 
absence of heat and haste indicate fine qualities. A 
gentleman makes no noise; a lady is serene. Propor- 
tionate is our disgust at those invaders who fill a stu- 
dious house with blast and running, to secure some 
paltry convenience. Not less I dislike a low sympathy 
of each with his neighbor's needs. Must we have a 
good understanding with one another's palates? as 
foolish people 32 who have lived long together know 
when each wants salt or sugar. I pray my companion, 
if he wishes for bread, to ask me for bread, and if he 
wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, 
and not to hold out his plate as if I knew already. 
Every natural function can be dignified by delibera- 
tion and privacy. Let us leave hurry to slaves. The 
compliments and ceremonies of our breeding should 
recall, 33 however remotely, the grandeur of our destiny. 
The flower of courtesy does not very well bide hand- 
ling, but if we dare to open another leaf and explore 
what parts go to its conformation, we shall find also 
an intellectual quality. To the leaders of men, the 
brain as well as the flesh and the heart must furnish a 
proportion. Defect in manners is usually the defect 
of fine perceptions. Men are too coarsely made for 
the delicacy of beautiful carriage and customs. It is 
not quite sufficient to good-breeding, a union of kind- 
ness and independence. We imperatively require a 
perception of, and a homage to beauty in our com- 
panions. Other virtues are in request in the field and 



MANNERS 221 

workyard, but a certain degree of taste is not to be 
spared in those we sit with. I could better eat with one 
who did not respect the truth or the laws than with a 
sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualities rule 
the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic. 
The same discrimination of fit and fair runs out, if 
with less rigor, into all parts of life. The average spirit 
of the energetic class is good sense, acting under certain 
limitations and to certain ends. It entertains every 
natural gift. Social in its nature, it respects everything 
which tends to unite men. It delights in measure. The 
love of beauty is mainly the love of measure or propor- 
tion. The person who screams, or uses the superlative 
degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing- 
rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. 
You must have genius or a prodigious usefulness if 
you will hide the want of measure. This perception 
comes in to polish and perfect the parts of the social 
instrument. Society will pardon much to genius and 
special gifts, but, being in its nature a convention, it 
loves what is conventional, or what belongs to coming 
together. 34 That makes the good and bad of manners, 
namely what helps or hinders fellowship. For fashion 
is not good sense absolute, but relative ; not good sense 
private, but good sense entertaining company. It 
hates corners and sharp points of character, hates 
quarrelsome, egotistical, solitary and gloomy people; 
hates whatever can interfere with total blending of 
parties; whilst it values all peculiarities as in the high- 
est degree refreshing, which can consist with good 
fellowship. And besides the general infusion of wit to 
heighten civility, the direct splendor of intellectual 
power is ever welcome in fine society as the costliest 
addition to its rule and its credit. 



222 ESSA YS 

The dry light must shine in to adorn our festival, 
but it must be tempered and shaded, or that will also 
offend. 35 Accuracy is essential to beauty, and quick 
perceptions to politeness, but not too quick perceptions. 
One may be too punctual and too precise. He must 
leave the omniscience of business at the door, when he 
comes into the palace of beauty. Society loves Creole 
natures and sleepy languishing manners, so that they 
cover sense, grace and good-will: the air of drowsy 
strength, which disarms criticism; perhaps because 
such a person seems to reserve himself for the best of 
the game, and not spend himself on surfaces ; an ignor- 
ing eye, which does not see the annoyances, shifts and 
inconveniences that cloud the brow and smother the 
voice of the sensitive. 

Therefore besides personal force and so much per- 
ception as constitutes unerring taste, society demands 
in its patrician class another element already intimated, 
which it significantly terms good-nature, — expressing 
all degrees of generosity, from the lowest willingness 
and faculty to oblige, up to the heights of magnanimity 
and love. Insight we must have, 36 or we shall run 
against one another and miss the way to our food ; but 
intellect is selfish and barren. The secret of success 
in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A man 
who is not happy in the company cannot find any word 
in his memory that will fit the occasion. All his infor- 
mation is a little impertinent. 37 A man who is happy 
there, finds in every turn of the conversation equally 
lucky occasions for the introduction of that which he 
has to say. The favorites of society, and what it calls 
whole souls, 38 are able men and of more spirit than wit, 
who have no uncomfortable egotism, but who exactly 
fill the hour and the company; contented and content- 



MANNERS 223 

ing, at a marriage or a funeral, a ball or a jury, a water- 
party or a shooting-match. England, which is rich in 
gentlemen, furnished, in the beginning of the present 
century, a good model of that genius which the world 
loves, in Mr. Fox, who added to his great abilities the 
most social disposition and real love of men. Parlia- 
mentary history has few better passages than the debate 
in which Burke and Fox separated in the House of 
Commons ; when Fox urged on his old friend the claims 
of old friendship with such tenderness that the house 
was moved to tears. Another anecdote is so close to 
my matter, that I must hazard the story. A tradesman 
who had long dunned him for a note of three hundred 
guineas, found him one day counting gold, and de- 
manded payment. " No," said Fox, " I owe this money 
to Sheridan; it is a debt of honor; if an accident should 
happen to me, he has nothing to show." "Then," said 
the creditor, " I change my debt into a debt of honor," 
and tore the note in pieces. Fox thanked the man for 
his confidence and paid him, saying, "his debt was of 
older standing, and Sheridan must wait." Lover of 
liberty, friend of the Hindoo, friend of the African 
slave, he possessed a great personal popularity; and 
Napoleon said of him on the occasion of his visit to 
Paris, in 1805, "Mr. Fox will always hold the first 
place in an assembly at the Tuileries." 

We may easily seem ridiculous in our eulogy of 
courtesy, whenever we insist on benevolence as its 
foundation. The painted phantasm Fashion rises to 
cast a species of derision on what we say. But I will 
neither be driven from some allowance to Fashion 
as a symbolic institution, nor from the belief that love 
is the basis of courtesy. 39 We must obtain that, if we 
can; but by all means we must affirm this. Life owes 



224 ESSAYS 

much of its spirit to these sharp contrasts. Fashion, 
which affects to be honor, is often, in all men's experi- 
ence, only a ballroom code. Yet so long as it is the 
highest circle in the imagination of the best heads on 
the planet, there is something necessary and excellent 
in it ; for it is not to be supposed that men have agreed 
to be the dupes of anything preposterous; and the re- 
spect which these mysteries inspire in the most rude 
and sylvan characters, and the curiosity with which 
details of high life are read, betray the universality of 
the love of cultivated manners. I know that a comic 
disparity would be felt, if we should enter the acknow- 
ledged ' first circles ' and apply these terrific standards 
of justice, beauty and benefit to the individuals actually 
found there. Monarchs and heroes, sages and lovers, 
these gallants are not. Fashion has many classes and 
many rules of probation and admission, and not the 
best alone. There is not only the right of conquest, 
which genius pretends, — the individual demonstrat- 
ing his natural aristocracy best of the best; 40 — but 
less claims will pass for the time; for Fashion loves 
lions, and points like Circe 41 to her horned company. 
This gentleman is this afternoon arrived from Den- 
mark; and that is my Lord Ride, who came yesterday 
from Bagdat; here is Captain Friese, from Cape Tur- 
nagain; and Captain Symmes, from the interior of the 
earth; and Monsieur Jovaire, who came down this 
morning in a balloon; Mr. Hobnail, the reformer; and 
Reverend Jul Bat, who has converted the whole torrid 
zone in his Sunday school; and Signor Torre del Greco, 
who extinguished Vesuvius by pouring into it the Bay 
of Naples; Spahi, the Persian ambassador; and Tul 
Wil Shan, the exiled nabob of Nepaul, whose saddle 
is the new moon. — But these are monsters of one day, 



MANNERS 225 

and to-morrow will be dismissed to their holes and 
dens ; for in these rooms every chair is waited for. The 
artist, the scholar, and, in general, the clerisy, 42 win 
their way up into these places and get represented here, 
somewhat on this footing of conquest. Another mode 
is to pass through all the degrees, spending a year and 
a day in St. Michael's Square, 43 being steeped in Co- 
logne water, and perfumed, and dined, and introduced, 
and properly grounded in all the biography and politics 
and anecdotes of the boudoirs. 

Yet these fineries may have grace and wit. Let there 
be grotesque sculpture 44 about the gates and offices of 
temples. Let the creed and commandments even have 
the saucy homage of parody. 45 The forms of politeness 
universally express benevolence in superlative degrees. 
What if they are in the mouths of selfish men, and 
used as means of selfishness ? What if the false gentle- 
man almost bows the true out of the world ? What if 
the false gentleman contrives so to address his compan- 
ion as civilly to exclude all others from his discourse, 
and also to make them feel excluded? Real service 
will not lose its nobleness. All generosity is not merely 
French and sentimental; nor is it to be concealed that 
living blood and a passion of kindness does at last dis- 
tinguish God's gentleman from Fashion's. The epitaph 
of Sir Jenkin Grout is not wholly unintelligible to 
the present age: "Here lies Sir Jenkin Grout, who 
loved his friend and persuaded his enemy: what his 
mouth ate, his hand paid for: what his servants robbed, 
he restored: if a woman gave him pleasure, he sup- 
ported her in pain: he never forgot his children; and 
whoso touched his finger, drew after it his whole 
body." 46 Even the line of heroes is not utterly extinct. 
There is still ever some admirable person in plain 



226 ESSAYS 

clothes, standing on the wharf, who jumps in to rescue 
a drowning man; there is still some absurd inventor of 
charities ; some guide and comforter of runaway slaves ; 
some friend of Poland ; some Philhellene ; some fanatic 
who plants shade-trees for the second and third gene- 
ration, and orchards when he is grown old; some well- 
concealed piety; some just man happy in an ill fame; 
some youth ashamed of the favors of fortune and im- 
patiently casting them on other shoulders. And these 
are the centres of society, on which it returns for fresh 
impulses. These are the creators of Fashion, which 
is an attempt to organize beauty of behavior. The 
beautiful and the generous are, in the theory, the doc- 
tors and apostles of this church: Scipio, and the Cid, 
and Sir Philip Sidney, and Washington, and every 
pure and valiant heart who worshipped Beauty by 
word and by deed. The persons who constitute the 
natural aristocracy are not found in the actual aristoc- 
racy, or only on its edge; as the chemical energy of the 
spectrum is found to be greatest just outside of the 
spectrum. Yet that is the infirmity of the seneschals, 
who do not know their sovereign when he appears. 
The theory of society supposes the existence and 
sovereignty of these. It divines afar off their coming. 
It says with the elder gods, — 

"As Heaven and Earth are fairer far 

Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs; 

And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth 

In form and shape compact and beautiful; . . . 

So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, 

A power more strong in beauty, born of us 

And fated to excel us, as we pass 

In glory that old Darkness .... 

. . . For 't is the eternal law 

That first in beauty shall be first in might." 47 



MANNERS 227 

Therefore, within the ethnical circle 48 of good so- 
ciety there is a narrower and higher circle, concentra- 
tion of its light, and flower of courtesy, to which there 
is always a tacit appeal of pride and reference, as to its 
inner and imperial court; the parliament of love and 
chivalry. And this is constituted of those persons in 
whom heroic dispositions are native; with the love 
of beauty, the delight in society, and the power to em- 
bellish the passing day. If the individuals who com- 
pose the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe, the 
guarded blood of centuries, should pass in review, in 
such manner as that we could at leisure and critically 
inspect their behavior, we might find no gentleman 
and no lady; for although excellent specimens of cour- 
tesy and high-breeding would gratify us in the assem- 
blage, in the particulars we should detect offence. Be- 
cause elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth. 
There must be romance of character, or the most fas- 
tidious exclusion of impertinencies will not avail. It 
must be genius which takes that direction: it must be 
not courteous, but courtesy. High behavior is as rare 
in fiction as it is in fact. Scott is praised for the fidelity 
with which he painted the demeanor and conversation 
of the superior classes. Certainly, kings and queens, 
nobles and great ladies, had some right to complain of 
the absurdity that had been put in their mouths before 
the days of Waverley; but neither does Scott's dialogue 
bear criticism. His lords brave each other in smart 
epigrammatic speeches, but the dialogue is in costume, 
and does not please on the second reading: it is not 
warm with life. In Shakspeare alone the speakers do 
not strut and bridle, the dialogue is easily great, and 
he adds to so many titles that of being the best-bred 
man in England and in Christendom. Once or twice 



228 ESSAYS 

in a lifetime we are permitted to enjoy the charm of 
noble manners, in the presence of a man or woman 
who have no bar in their nature, but whose character 
emanates freely in their word and gesture. A beautiful 
form is better than a beautiful face; a beautiful be- 
havior is better than a beautiful form : it gives a higher 
pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the 
fine arts. 49 A man is but a little thing in the midst of 
the objects of nature, yet, by the moral quality radiat- 
ing from his countenance he may abolish all consider- 
ations of magnitude, and in his manners equal the 
majesty of the world. I have seen an individual whose 
manners, though wholly within the conventions of 
elegant society, were never learned there, but were 
original and commanding and held out protection and 
prosperity; one who did not need the aid of a court- 
suit, but carried the holiday in his eye ; who exhilarated 
the fancy by flinging wide the doors of new modes of 
existence; who shook off the captivity of etiquette, 
with happy, spirited bearing, good-natured and free as 
Robin Hood ; yet with the port of an emperor, if need 
be, — calm, serious and fit to stand the gaze of millions. 
The open air and the fields, the street and public 
chambers are the places where Man executes his will; 
let him yield or divide the sceptre at the door of the 
house. Woman, with her instinct of behavior, instantly 
detects in man a love of trifles, any coldness or imbecil- 
ity, or, in short, any want of that large, flowing and 
magnanimous deportment which is indispensable as 
an exterior in the hall. Our American institutions 
have been friendly to her, and at this moment I esteem 
it a chief felicity of this country, that it excels in women. 
A certain awkward consciousness of inferiority in the 
men may give rise to the new chivalry in behalf of 



MANNERS 229 

Woman's Rights. Certainly let her be as much better 
placed in the laws and in social forms as the most zeal- 
ous reformer can ask, but I confide so entirely in her 
inspiring and musical nature, that I believe only her- 
self can show us how she shall be served. The won- 
derful generosity of her sentiments raises her at times 
into heroical and godlike regions, and verifies the pic- 
tures of Minerva, Juno, or Polymnia; and by the firm- 
ness with which she treads her upward path, she con- 
vinces the coarsest calculators 50 that another road 
exists than that which their feet know. But besides 
those who make good in our imagination the place of 
muses and of Delphic Sibyls, are there not women who 
fill our vase with wine and roses to the brim, so that 
the wine runs over and fills the house with perfume; 
who inspire us with courtesy ; who unloose our tongues 
and we speak; who anoint our eyes and we see ? 51 We 
say things we never thought to have said ; for once, our 
walls of habitual reserve vanished and left us at large; 
we were children playing with children in a wide field 
of flowers. Steep us, we cried, in these influences, for 
days, for weeks, and we shall be sunny poets and will 
write out in many-colored words the romance that you 
are. Was it Hafiz or Firdousi 52 that said of his Per- 
sian Lilla, She was an elemental force, and astonished 
me by her amount of life, when I saw her day after day 
radiating, every instant, redundant joy and grace on 
all around her ? She was a solvent powerful to recon- 
cile all heterogeneous persons into one society: like air 
or water, an element of such a great range of affinities 
that it combines readily with a thousand substances. 
Where she is present all others will be more than they 
are wont. She was a unit and whole, so that whatso- 
ever she did, became her. She had too much sympathy 



230 ESS A YS 

and desire to please, than that you could say her man- 
ners were marked with dignity, yet no princess could 
surpass her clear and erect demeanor on each occasion. 
She did not study the Persian grammar, nor the books 
of the seven poets, but all the poems of the seven seemed 
to be written upon her. For though the bias of her 
nature was not to thought, but to sympathy, yet was 
she so perfect in her own nature as to meet intellectual 
persons by the fulness of her heart, warming them by 
her sentiments; believing, as she did, that by dealing 
nobly with all, all would show themselves noble. 

I know that this Byzantine pile 53 of chivalry or 
Fashion, which seems so fair and picturesque to those 
who look at the contemporary facts for science or for 
entertainment, is not equally pleasant to all spectators. 
The constitution of our society makes it a giant's castle 
to the ambitious youth who have not found their names 
enrolled in its Golden Book, 54 and whom it has ex- 
cluded from its coveted honors and privileges. They 
have yet to learn that its seeming grandeur is shadowy 
and relative : it is great by their allowance ; its proudest 
gates will fly open at the approach of their courage 
and virtue. For the present distress, however, of those 
who are predisposed to suffer from the tyrannies of 
this caprice, there are easy remedies. To remove your 
residence a couple of miles, 55 or at most four, will com- 
monly relieve the most extreme susceptibility. For the 
advantages which fashion values are plants which 
thrive in very confined localities, in a few streets namely. 
Out of this precinct they go for nothing; are of no use 
in the farm, in the forest, in the market, in war, in the 
nuptial society, in the literary or scientific circle, at sea, 
in friendship, in the heaven of thought or virtue. 



MANNERS 231 

But we have lingered long enough in these painted 
courts. The worth of the thing signified must vindicate 
our taste for the emblem. Everything that is called 
fashion and courtesy humbles itself before the cause 
and fountain of honor, creator of titles and dignities, 
namely the heart of love. This is the royal blood, this 
the fire, which 56 in all countries and contingencies, will 
work after its kind and conquer and expand all that 
approaches it. This gives new meanings to every fact. 
This impoverishes the rich, suffering no grandeur but 
its own. What is rich? Are you rich enough to help 
anybody? to succor the unfashionable and the eccen- 
tric ? rich enough to make the Canadian in his wagon, 
the itinerant with his consul's paper which commends 
him "To the charitable," the swarthy Italian with his 
few broken words of English, the lame pauper hunted 
by overseers from town to town, even the poor insane 
or besotted wreck of man or woman, feel the noble 
exception of your presence and your house from the 
general bleakness and stoniness ; to make such feel that 
they were greeted with a voice which made them both 
remember and hope ? What is vulgar but to refuse the 
claim on acute and conclusive reasons ? 57 What is 
gentle, but to allow it, and give their heart and yours 
one holiday from the national caution? Without the 
rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar. The king of 
Schiraz could not afford to be so bountiful as the poor 
Osman 58 who dwelt at his gate. Osman had a hu- 
manity so broad and deep that although his speech 
was so bold and free with the Koran as to disgust all 
the dervishes, yet was there never a poor outcast, eccen- 
tric, or insane man, some fool who had cut off his 
beard, or who had been mutilated under a vow, or had 
a pet madness in his brain, but fled at once to him; 



232 ESSAYS 

that great heart lay there so sunny and hospitable in 
the centre of the country, that it seemed as if the in- 
stinct of all sufferers drew them to his side. And the 
madness which he harbored he did not share. Is not 
this to be rich ? this only to be rightly rich ? 

But I shall hear without pain that I play the courtier 
very ill, and talk of that which I do not well under- 
stand. It is easy to see that what is called by distinc- 
tion society and fashion has good laws as well as bad, 
has much that is necessary, and much that is absurd. 
Too good for banning, 59 and too bad for blessing, it 
reminds us of a tradition of the pagan mythology, in 
any attempt to settle its character. * I overheard Jove, 
one day,' said Silenus, ' talking of destroying the earth; 
he said it had failed ; they were all rogues and vixens, 
who went from bad to worse, as fast as the days suc- 
ceeded each other. Minerva said she hoped not; they 
were only ridiculous little creatures, with this odd cir- 
cumstance, that they had a blur, or indeterminate 
aspect, seen far or seen near; if you called them bad, 
they would appear so; if you called them good, they 
would appear so; and there was no one person or ac- 
tion among them which would not puzzle her owl, 
much more all Olympus, to know whether it was fun- 
damentally bad or good.' 60 



FRIENDSHIP 

A ruddy drop of manly blood * 

The surging sea outweighs; 

The world uncertain comes and goes, 

The lover rooted stays. 

I fancied he was fled, 

And, after many a year, 

Glowed unexhausted kindliness 

Like daily sunrise there. 

My careful heart was free again, — 

O friend, my bosom said, 

Through thee alone the sky is arched, 

Through thee the rose is red, 

All things through thee take nobler form 

And look beyond the earth, 

The mill-round of our fate appears 3 

A sun-path in thy worth. 

Me too thy nobleness has taught 

To master my despair; 

The fountains of my hidden life 

Are through thy friendship fair. 



FRIENDSHIP 

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever 
spoken. Maugre all the selfishness that chills like east 
winds the world, the whole human family is bathed 
with an element of love like a fine ether. How many 
persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak 
to, whom yet we honor, and who honor us ! How many 
we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom, though 
silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the lan- 
guage of these wandering eye-beams. The heart know- 
eth. 

The effect of the indulgence of this human affection 
is a certain cordial exhilaration. In poetry and in com- 
mon speech the emotions of benevolence and compla- 
cency which are felt towards others are likened to the 
material effects of fire; so swift, or much more swift, 
more active, more cheering, are these fine inward ir- 
radiations. From the highest degree of passionate 
love to the lowest degree of good-will, they make the 
sweetness of life. 

Our intellectual and active powers increase with our 
affection. 3 The scholar sits down to write, and all his 
years of meditation do not furnish him with one good 
thought or happy expression; but it is necessary to 
write a letter to a friend, — and forthwith troops of 
gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with 
chosen words. See, in any house where virtue and self- 
respect abide, the palpitation which the approach of a 
stranger causes. A commended stranger is expected 



236 ESSAYS 

and announced, and an uneasiness betwixt pleasure 
and pain invades all the hearts of a household. His ar- 
rival almost brings fear to the good hearts that would 
welcome him. The house is dusted, all things fly into 
their places, the old coat is exchanged for the new, 
and they must get up a dinner if they can. Of a com- 
mended stranger, only the good report is told by others, 
only the good and new is heard by us. He stands to us 
for humanity. He is what we wish. Having imagined 
and invested him, we ask how we should stand related 
in conversation and action with such a man, and are 
uneasy with fear. The same idea exalts conversation 
with him. We talk better than we are wont. 4 We have 
the nimblest fancy, a richer memory, and our dumb 
devil has taken leave for the time. For long hours we 
can continue a series of sincere, graceful, rich commun- 
ications, drawn from the oldest, secretest experience, 
so that they who sit by, of our own kinsfolk and ac- 
quaintance, shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual 
powers. But as soon as the stranger begins to intrude 
his partialities, his definitions, his defects into the con- 
versation, it is all over. 5 He has heard the first, the last 
and best he will ever hear from us. He is no stranger 
now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension are old ac- 
quaintances. Now, when he comes, he may get the 
order, the dress and the dinner, — but the throbbing of 
the heart and the communications of the soul, no more. 
What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which 
make a young world for me again ? What so delicious 
as a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a 
feeling? How beautiful, on their approach to this 
beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and 
the true! The moment we indulge our affections, the 
earth is metamorphosed; 6 there is no winter and no 



FRIENDSHIP 237 

night; all tragedies, all ennuis vanish, — all duties 
even ; nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms 
all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be as- 
sured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin 
its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone 
for a thousand years. 

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for 
my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God 
the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me in his 
gifts ? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I 
am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely 
and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass 
my gate. Who hears me, who understands me, becomes 
mine, — a possession for all time. Nor is Nature so 
poor but she gives me this joy several times, and thus 
we weave social threads of our own, a new web of re- 
lations; and, as many thoughts in succession substant- 
iate themselves, we shall by and by stand in a new 
world of our own creation, and no longer strangers 
and pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My friends have 
come to me unsought. The great God gave them to 
me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue 
with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity 
in me and in them 7 derides and cancels the thick walls 
of individual character, relation, age, sex, circum- 
stance, at which he usually connives, and now makes 
many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent lovers, 
who carry out the world for me to new and noble 
depths, and enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts. 
These are new poetry of the first Bard, — poetry with- 
out stop, — hymn, ode and epic, poetry still flowing, 
Apollo and the Muses chanting still. Will these too 
separate themselves from me again, or some of them ? 
I know not, but I fear it not ; for my relation to them 



238 ESSAYS 

is so pure that we hold by simple affinity, and the 
Genius of my life being thus social, the same affinity 
will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as 
these men and women, wherever I may be. 

I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this 
point. It is almost dangerous to me to "crush the 
sweet poison of misused wine" 8 of the affections. A 
new person is to me a great event and hinders me from 
sleep. I have often had fine fancies about persons 
which have given me delicious hours; but the joy ends 
in the day; it yields no fruit. Thought is not born of it; 
my action is very little modified. I must feel pride in 
my friend's accomplishments as if they were mine, 
and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when 
he is praised, as the lover when he hears applause of 
his engaged maiden. We over-estimate the conscience 
of our friend. His goodness seems better than our 
goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Every- 
thing that is his, — his name, his form, his dress, books 
and instruments, — fancy enhances. Our own thought 
sounds new and larger from his mouth. 9 

Yet the systole and diastole 10 of the heart are not 
without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love. 
Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good 
to be believed. The lover, beholding his maiden, half 
knows that she is not verily that which he worships; 
and in the golden hour of friendship we are surprised 
with shades of suspicion and unbelief. We doubt that 
we bestow on our hero the virtues in which he shines, 
and afterwards worship the form to which we have as- 
cribed this divine inhabitation. In strictness, the soul 
does not respect men as it respects itself. In strict sci- 
ence all persons underlie the same condition of an infi- 
nite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by min- 



FRIENDSHIP 239 

ing for the metaphysical foundation of this Elysian 
temple ? Shall I not be as real as the things I see ? If 
I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they are. 
Their essence is not less beautiful than their appear- 
ance, though it needs finer organs for its apprehen- 
sion. The root of the plant is not unsightly to science, 
though for chaplets and festoons we cut the stem 
short. And I must hazard the production of the bald 
fact amidst these pleasing reveries, though it should 
prove an Egyptian skull " at our banquet. A man who 
stands united with his thought conceives magnifi- 
cently of himself. He is conscious of a universal suc- 
cess, 12 even though bought by uniform particular fail- 
ures. No advantages, no powers, no gold or force, 
can be any match for him. I cannot choose but rely 
on my own poverty more than on your wealth. I can- 
not make your consciousness tantamount to mine. 
Only the star dazzles; the planet has a faint, moonlike 
ray. I hear what you say of the admirable parts and 
tried temper of the party you praise, but I see well 
that, for all his purple cloaks, I shall not like him, un- 
less he is at least a poor Greek like me. I cannot deny 
it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the Phenomenal 
includes thee also in its pied and painted immensity, 
— thee also, compared with whom all else is shadow. 
Thou art not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is, — thou 
art not my soul, but a picture and effigy of that. Thou 
hast come to me lately, and already thou art seizing 
thy hat and cloak. 13 Is it not that the soul puts forth 
friends as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently, by 
the germination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf? 
The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each 
electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul 
environs itself with friends that it may enter into a 



240 ESSAYS 

grander self -acquaintance or solitude; 14 and it goes 
alone for a season that it may exalt its conversa- 
tion or society. This method betrays itself along the 
whole history of our personal relations. The instinct 
of affection revives the hope of union with our mates, 
and the returning sense of insulation recalls us from 
the chase. Thus every man passes his life in the search 
after friendship, and if he should record his true senti- 
ment, he might write a letter like this to each new 
candidate for his love : — 

Dear Friend, 

If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to 
match my mood with thine, I should never think again 
of trifles in relation to thy comings and goings. I am 
not very wise; my moods are quite attainable, and I 
respect thy genius; it is to me as yet unfathomed;vyet 
dare I not presume in thee a perfect intelligence of me, 
and so thou art to me a delicious torment. Thine ever, 
or never. 

Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for 
curiosity and not for life. 15 They are not to be indulged. 
This is to weave cobweb, and not cloth. Our friend- 
ships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we 
have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead 
of the tough fibre of the human heart. The laws of 
friendship 16 are austere and eternal, of one web with 
the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed 
at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a sudden sweet- 
ness. 17 We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole gar- 
den of God, which many summers and many winters 
must ripen. We seek our friend not sacredly, 18 but 
with an adulterate passion which would appropriate 



FRIENDSHIP 241 

him to ourselves. In vain. We are armed all over with 
subtle antagonisms, which, as soon as we meet, begin 
to play, and translate all poetry into stale prose. Al- 
most all people descend to meet. 19 All association must 
be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower 
and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful na- 
tures disappears as they approach each other. What 
a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of 
the virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been 
compassed with long foresight we must be tormented 
presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable 
apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in 
the heyday of friendship and thought. Our faculties 
do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by 
solitude. 

I ought to be equal to every relation. 20 It makes no 
difference how many friends I have and what content 
I can find in conversing with each, if there be one to 
whom I am not equal. If I have shrunk unequal from 
one contest, the joy I find in all the rest becomes mean 
and cowardly. I should hate myself, if then I made 
my other friends my asylum : — 

" The valiant warrior famoused for fight, 
After a hundred victories, once foiled, 
Is from the book of honor razed quite 
And all the rest forgot for which he toiled." 21 

Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashful- 
ness and apathy are a tough husk in which a delicate 
organization is protected from premature ripening. 
It would be lost if it knew itself before any of the best 
souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. Re- 
spect the naturlangsamkeit 22 which hardens the ruby 
in a million years, and works in duration in which 
Alps and Andes come and go as rainbows. The good 



242 ESSAYS 

spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price of 
rashness. 23 Love, which is the essence of God, is not 
for levity, but for the total worth of man. Let us not 
have this childish luxury in our regards, but the aus- 
terest worth; let us approach our friend with an auda- 
cious trust in the truth of his heart, in the breadth, im- 
possible to be overturned, of his foundations. 

The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, 
and I leave, for the time, all account of subordinate 
social benefit, to speak of that select and sacred rela- 
tion which is a kind of absolute, and which even leaves 
the language of love suspicious and common, so much 
is this purer, and nothing is so much divine. 

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with 
roughest courage. When they are real, they are not 
glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we 
know. For now, after so many ages of experience, what 
do we know of nature or of ourselves ? Not one step 
has man taken toward the solution of the problem of 
his destiny. In one condemnation of folly stand the 
whole universe of men. 24 But the sweet sincerity of joy 
and peace which I draw from this alliance with my 
brother's soul is the nut itself 25 whereof all nature and 
all thought is but the husk and shell. Happy is the 
house that shelters a friend! It might well be built, 
like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single 
day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that rela- 
tion and honor its law ! He who offers himself a candi- 
date for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to 
the great games where the first-born of the world are 
the competitors. He proposes himself for contests 
where Time, Want, Danger, are in the lists, and he 
alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitu- 
tion to preserve the delicacy of his beauty from the 



FRIENDSHIP 243 

wear and tear of all these. The gifts of fortune may be 
present or absent, but all the speed in that contest de- 
pends on intrinsic nobleness and the contempt of tri- 
fles. There are two elements that go to the composi- 
tion of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect 
no superiority in either, no reason why either should 
be first named. One is truth. A friend is a person with 
whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. 
I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real 
and equal that I may drop even those undermost gar- 
ments 26 of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, 
which men never put off, and may deal with him with 
the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical 
atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, 27 
like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank; 
that being permitted to speak truth, as having none 
above it to court or conform unto. Every man alone 
is sincere. 28 At the entrance of a second person, hypoc- 
risy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our 
fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amuse- 
ments, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him 
under a hundred folds. I knew a man who under a 
certain religious frenzy cast off this drapery, and omit- 
ting all compliment and commonplace, spoke to the 
conscience of every person he encountered, and that 
with great insight and beauty. 29 At first he was resisted, 
and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting — as 
indeed he could not help doing — for some time in 
this course, he attained to the advantage of bringing 
every man of his acquaintance into true relations with 
him. No man would think of speaking falsely with 
him, or of putting him off with any chat of markets or 
reading-rooms. But every man was constrained by so 
much sincerity to the like plaindealing, and what love 



244 ESSAYS 

of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, 
he did certainly show him. But to most of us society 
shows not its face and eye, but its side and its back. 
To stand in true relations with men in a false age is 
worth a fit of insanity, is it not ? 30 We can seldom go 
erect. Almost every man we meet requires some civ- 
ility — requires to be humored ; he has some fame, 
some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in 
his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils 
all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man 
who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend 
gives me entertainment without requiring any stipula- 
tion on my part. A friend therefore is a sort of paradox 
in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in na- 
ture whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence 
to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in 
all its height, variety and curiosity, reiterated in a for- 
eign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the 
masterpiece of nature. 31 

The other element of friendship is tenderness. We 
are holden to men by every sort of tie, by blood, by 
pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate, by 
admiration, by every circumstance and badge and 
trifle, — but we can scarce believe that so much char- 
acter can subsist in another as to draw us by love. 
Can another be so blessed and we so pure that we can 
offer him tenderness ? When a man becomes dear to 
me I have touched the goal of fortune. I find very 
little written directly to the heart of this matter in 
books. And yet I have one text which I cannot choose 
but remember. My author 32 says, — "I offer myself 
faintly and bluntly to those whose I effectually am, 
and tender myself least to him to whom I am the most 
devoted. " I wish that friendship should have feet, as 



FRIENDSHIP 245 

well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the 
ground, before it vaults over the moon. I wish it to be 
a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub. We 
chide the citizen because he makes love a commodity. 
It is an exchange of gifts, of useful loans; it is good 
neighborhood; it watches with the sick; it holds the 
pall at the funeral; and quite loses sight of the delica- 
cies and nobility of the relation. But though we can- 
not find the god under this disguise of a sutler, yet on 
the other hand we cannot forgive the poet if he spins 
his thread too fine and does not substantiate his ro- 
mance by the municipal virtues of justice, punctual- 
ity, fidelity and pity. I hate the prostitution of the 
name of friendship to signify modish and worldly al- 
liances. I much prefer the company of ploughboys 
and tin -peddlers to the silken and perfumed amity 33 
which celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous 
display, by rides in a curricle and dinners at the best 
taverns. The end of friendship is a commerce the most 
strict and homely that can be joined; more strict than 
any of which we have experience. It is for aid and 
comfort through all the relations and passages of life 
and death. It is fit for serene days and graceful gifts 
and country rambles, but also for rough roads and 
hard fare, shipwreck, poverty and persecution. It 
keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the 
trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other 
the daily needs and offices of man's life, and embel- 
lish it by courage, wisdom and unity. It should never 
fall into something usual and settled, but should be 
alert and inventive and add rhyme and reason to what 
was drudgery. 34 

Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and 
costly, each so well tempered and so happily adapted, 



246 ESSAYS 

and withal so circumstanced (for even in that par- 
ticular, a poet says, love demands that the parties be 
altogether paired), that its satisfaction can very seldom 
be assured. It cannot subsist in its perfection, say 
some of those who are learned in this warm lore of the 
heart, betwixt more than two. I am not quite so strict 
in my terms, perhaps because I have never known so 
high a fellowship as others. I please my imagination 
more with a circle of godlike men and women variously 
related to each other and between whom subsists a 
lofty intelligence. But I find this law of one to one per- 
emptory for conversation, 35 which is the practice and 
consummation of friendship. Do not mix waters too 
much. 36 The best mix as ill as good and bad. You 
shall have very useful and cheering discourse at sev- 
eral times with two several men, but let all three of 
you come together and you shall not have one new 
and hearty word. Two may talk and one may hear, 
but three cannot take part in a conversation of the 
most sincere and searching sort. In good company 
there is never such discourse between two, across the 
table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In 
good company the individuals merge their egotism 
into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several 
consciousnesses there present. No partialities of 
friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of 
wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite other- 
wise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the 
common thought of the party, and not poorly limited 
to his own. Now this convention, which good sense 
demands, destroys the high freedom of great conver- 
sation, which requires an absolute running of two 
souls into one. 

No two men but being left alone with each other 



FRIENDSHIP 247 

enter into simpler relations. Yet it is affinity that de- 
termines which two shall converse. Unrelated men 
give little joy to each other, will never suspect the la- 
tent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a great 
talent for conversation, as if it were a permanent pro- 
perty in some individuals. Conversation is an evanes- 
cent relation, — no more. 37 A man is reputed to have 
thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a 
word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his si- 
lence with as much reason as they would blame the 
insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will 
mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought 
he will regain his tongue. 

Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness 
and unlikeness that piques each with the presence of 
power and of consent in the other party. Let me be 
alone to the end of the world, rather than that my 
friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his real 
sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and 
by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be 
himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that 
the not mine is mine. I hate, where I looked for a manly 
f utherance or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush 
of concession. 38 Better be a nettle in the side of your 
friend than his echo. The condition which high friend- 
ship demands is ability to do without it. That high 
office requires great and sublime parts. There must 
be very two, before there can be very one. Let it be an 
alliance of two large, formidable natures, mutually 
beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the 
deep identity which, beneath these disparities, unites 
them. 

He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; 
who is sure that greatness and goodness are always 



248 ESSAYS 

economy; who is not swift to intermeddle with his for- 
tunes. Let him not intermeddle with this. Leave to 
the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate 
the births of the eternal. Friendship demands a relig- 
ious treatment. We talk of choosing our friends, but 
friends are self -elected. Reverence is a great part of it. 
Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course he has 
merits that are not yours, 39 and that you cannot honor 
if you must needs hold him close to your person. 
Stand aside; give those merits room; let them mount 
and expand. Are you the friend of your friend's but- 
tons, 40 or of his thought ? To a great heart he will 
still be a stranger in a thousand particulars, that he 
may come near in the holiest ground. Leave it to girls 
and boys to regard a friend as property, and to suck 
a short and all-confounding pleasure, instead of the 
noblest benefit. 41 

Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long pro- 
bation. Why should we desecrate noble and beauti- 
ful souls by intruding on them ? Why insist on rash 
personal relations with your friend ? 42 Why go to his 
house, or know his mother and brother and sisters ? 
Why be visited by him at your own ? Are these things 
material to our covenant? Leave this touching and 
clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a 
thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but 
not news, nor pottage. I can get politics and chat and 
neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions. 
Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, 
pure, universal and great as nature itself? Ought I 
to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yon- 
der bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that 
clump of waving grass that divides the brook ? Let us 
not vilify, but raise it to that standard. That great 



FRIENDSHIP 249 

defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien and action, 
do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify 
and enchance. Worship his superiorities; wish him 
not less by a thought, but hoard and tell them all. 
Guard him as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee for 
ever a sort of beautiful enemy, 43 untamable, devoutly 
revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon out- 
grown and cast aside. The hues of the opal, the light 
of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near. 
To my friend I write a letter and from him I receive a 
letter. 44 That seems to you a little. It suffices me. It 
is a spiritual gift, worthy of him to give and of me to 
receive. It profanes nobody. In these warm lines the 
heart will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, and 
pour out the prophecy of a godlier existence than all 
the annals of heroism have yet made good. 

Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as 
not to prejudice its perfect flower by your impatience 
for its opening. We must be our own before we can 
be another's. There is at least this satisfaction in 
crime, according to the Latin proverb ; — you can 
speak to your accomplice on even terms. Crimen quos 
inquinat, (squat.** To those whom we admire and 
love, at first we cannot. Yet the least defect of self- 
possession vitiates, in my judgment, the entire rela- 
tion. There can never be deep peace between two 
spirits, never mutual respect, until in their dialogue 
each stands for the whole world. 

What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what 
grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent, 46 — so we 
may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us not interfere. 
Who set you to cast about what you should say to the 
select souls, or how to say anything to such ? No mat- 
ter how ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. 



250 ESSAYS 

There are innumerable degrees of folly and wisdom, 
and for you to say aught is to be frivolous. Wait, 
and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary 
and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night 
avail themselves of your lips. The only reward of 
virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be 
one. You shall not come nearer a man by getting into 
his house. If unlike, his soul only flees the faster from 
you, and you shall never catch a true glance of his eye. 
We see the noble afar off and they repel us ; why should 
we intrude ? Late, — very late, — we perceive that 
no arrangements, 47 no introductions, no consuetudes 
or habits of society would be of any avail to establish 
us in such relations with them as we desire, — but 
solely, the uprise of nature in us to the same degree it 
is in them; then shall we meet as water with water; 
and if we should not meet them then, we shall not 
want them, for we are already they. In the last analy- 
sis, love is only the reflection of a man's own worthi- 
ness from other men. Men have sometimes exchanged 
names with their friends, as if they would signify that 
in their friend each loved his own soul. 

The higher the style we demand of friendship, of 
course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. 
We walk alone in the world. Friends such as we de- 
sire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers 
ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions 
of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring 
and daring, which can love us and which we can love. 
We may congratulate ourselves that the period of 
nonage, of follies, of blunders and of shame, is passed 
in solitude, and when we are finished men we shall 
grasp heroic hands in heroic hands. 48 Only be admon- 
ished by what you already see, not to strike leagues 



FRIENDSHIP 251 

of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship 
can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and fool- 
ish alliances which no god attends. By persisting in 
your path, though you forfeit the little you gain the 
great. You demonstrate yourself, so as to put your- 
self out of the reach of false relations, and you draw 
to you the first-born of the world, — those rare pil- 
grims whereof only one or two wander in nature at 
once, and before whom the vulgar great show as spec- 
tres and shadows merely. 

It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spir- 
itual, as if so we could lose any genuine love. What- 
ever correction of our popular views we make from 
insight, nature will be sure to bear us out in, and 
though it seem to rob us of some joy, will repay us 
with a greater. Let us feel if we will the absolute in- 
sulation of man. 49 We are sure that we have all in us. 
We go to Europe, or we pursue persons, or we read 
books, in the instinctive faith that these will call it out 
and reveal us to ourselves. Beggars all. The persons 
are such as we; the Europe, an old faded garment of 
dead persons; the books, their ghosts. Let us drop 
this idolatry. Let us give over this mendicancy. Let 
us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, 
saying, 'Who are you ? Unhand me: I will be depen- 
dent no more.' Ah! seest thou not, O brother, that 
thus we part only to meet again on a higher plat- 
form, and only be more each other's because we are 
more our own ? A friend is Janus-faced ; he looks to 
the past and the future. He is the child of all my fore- 
going hours, the prophet of those to come, and the 
harbinger of a greater friend. 

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. 
I would have them where I can find them, but I sel- 



252 ESS A YS 

dom use them. We must have society on our own terms 
and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot 
afford to speak much with my friend. 50 If he is great 
he makes me so great that I cannot descend to con- 
verse. In the great days, presentiments hover before 
me in the firmament. I ought then to dedicate myself 
to them. I go in that I may seize them, I go out that 
I may seize them. I fear only that I may lose them 
receding into the sky in which now they are only a 
patch of brighter light, Then, though I prize my 
friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study 
their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give 
me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, 
this spiritual astronomy or search of stars, and come 
down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know 
well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty 
gods. It is true, next week I shall have languid moods, 
when I can well afford to occupy myself with foreign 
objects; then I shall regret the lost literature of your 
mind, and wish you were by my side again. But if you 
come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new 
visions; not with yourself but with your lustres, and I 
shall not be able any more than now to converse with 
you. So I will owe to my friends this evanescent inter- 
course. I will receive from them not what they have 
but what they are. They shall give me that which pro- 
perly they cannot give, but which emanates from them. 
But they shall not hold me by any relations less sub- 
tile and pure. We will meet as though we met not, 
and part as though we parted not. 

It has seemed to me lately more possible than I 
knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, with- 
out due correspondence on the other. Why should I 
cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is. not 



FRIENDSHIP 253 

capacious ? It never troubles the sun that some of his 
rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only 
a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your great- 
ness educate the crude and cold companion. If he is 
unequal, he will presently pass away; but thou art 
enlarged by thy own shining, and no longer a mate for 
frogs and worms, dost soar and burn with the gods of 
the empyrean. It is thought a disgrace to love unre- 
quited. But the great will see that true love cannot be 
unrequited. 51 True love transcends the unworthy ob- 
ject and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when 
the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but 
feels rid of so much earth and feels its independency 
the surer. Yet these things may hardly be said with- 
out a sort of treachery to the relation.. The essence 
of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and 
trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. 
It treats its object as a god, that it may deify both. 



NOTES 



HISTORY 

This is the essay first in the list of those presented to the 
public as the " First Series'' of Emerson's essays. Part of the in- 
troduction provided by the Centenary Edition gives these facts 
and comments : — 

After the publication of Nature, the first hint that appears 
of the collection by Mr. Emerson of his writings into a second 
book, occurs in the end of a letter to Mr. Alcott, written April 
16, 1839, which Mr. Sanborn gives in his Memoir of Bronson 
Alcott: " I have been writing a little, and arranging old papers 
more, and by and by I hope to get a shapely book of Genesis." 

In a letter written in April, 1840, to Carlyle, Mr. Emerson 
thus alludes to the Essays : — 

" I am here at work now for a fortnight to spin some single 
cord out of my thousand and one strands of every color and 
texture that lie ravelled around me in old snarls. We need to 
be possessed with a mountainous conviction of the value of our 
advice to our contemporaries, if we will take such pains to find 
what that is. But no, it is the pleasure of the spinning that be- 
trays poor spinners into the loss of so much good time. I shall 
work with the more diligence on this book-to-be of mine, that 
you inform me again and again that my penny tracts are still 
extant; nay, that beside friendly men, learned and poetic men 
read and even review them. I am like Scholasticus of the Greek 
Primer, who was ashamed to bring out so small a dead child 
before such grand people. Pygmalion shall try if he cannot 
fashion a better, — certainly a bigger." 

Soon after Nature had appeared, Carlyle had written to 
his friend: "There is a man here called John Sterling, . . . 
whom I love better than any one I have met with, since a cer- 
tain sky-messenger alighted to me at Craigenputtock and van- 
ished in the Blue again. . . . Well, and what then, cry you? 
Why then, this John Sterling has fallen overhead in love with a 
certain Waldo Emerson; that is all. He saw the little book Na- 
ture lying here; and, across a whole silva silvarum of prejudices, 
discerned what was in it, took it to his heart, — and indeed into 
his pocket. . . . This is the small piece of pleasant news, that 
two sky-messengers (such they were, both of them, to me) have 
met and recognized each other, and by God's blessing there shall 
one day be a trio of us; call you that nothing?" Sterling wrote 
to Emerson and a noble friendship resulted. Although they 



NOTES 291 

never met in the body, these friends had more in common with 
each other in their hope, their courage, and their desire for ex- 
pression in poetry than either had with Carlyle. Sterling died in 
1844. 

In a curious and characteristic preface, among other things, 
Carlyle said : — 

" The name of Ralph Waldo Emerson is not entirely new in 
England ; distinguished travellers bring us tidings of such a man ; 
fractions of his writings have found their way into the hands of 
the curious here ; fitful hints that there is in New England some 
spiritual notability called Emerson glide through the reviews 
and magazines." 

In Berlin, Herman Grimm (who later wrote the lives of 
Michelangelo and Raphael) , while waiting his turn in the parlor 
of the American dentist, chanced to pick up the Essays from 
the table; "read a page, and was startled to find that I had un- 
derstood nothing, though tolerably well acquainted with English. 
I inquired as to the author. In reply I was told that he was the 
first writer in America, an eminently gifted man, but somewhat 
crazed at times, and often unable to explain his own words. 
Notwithstanding, no one was held in such esteem for his char- 
acter and for his prose writings. In short, the opinion fell upon 
my ears as so strange that I re-opened the book. Some sentences, 
upon a second reading, shot like a beam of light into my very 
soul, and I was moved to put the book in my pocket, that I 
might read it more attentively at home. ... I took Webster's 
Dictionary and began to read. The construction of the sen- 
tences struck me as very extraordinary. I soon discovered the 
secret: they were real thoughts, an individual language, a sin- 
cere man that I had before me; naught superficial, second-hand. 
Enough! I bought the book! From that time I have never 
ceased to read Emerson's works, and whenever I take up a 
volume anew it seems to me as if I were reading it for the first 
time." 

" History " was not delivered as a single lecture, but in writ- 
ing it Mr. Emerson made use of passages from lectures in three 
distinct courses; namely, that on "English Literature" (1835- 
36) , on " The Philosophy of History " (1836-37) , and on " Human 
Life " (1837-38), as is shown by Mr. Cabot in the chronological 
list of lectures and addresses in the Appendix (F) to his Memoir. 

The course on " The Philosophy of History" (1836-37) had 
the following lectures, many of which appear as such or in their 
matter in the Essays : — 

I. Introduction (History VI. Religion, 

has been ill written ; its VII. Society, 
meaning and future, etc.) VIII. Trades and Professions. 
II. Humanity of Science. IX. Manners. 

III. Art. X. Ethics. 

IV. Literature. XL Present Age. 

V. Politics. XII. Individualism. 



292 NOTES 

In his Journal, Mr. Emerson thus lays out the course in ad- 
vance, with the belief in the Over-Soul as the foundation of all. 

There is one soul. 

It is related to the world. 

Art is its action thereon. 

Science finds its methods. 

Literature is its record. 

Religion is the emotion of reverence that it inspires. 

Ethics is the soul illustrated in human life. 

Society is the finding of this soul by individuals in each other. 

Trades are the learning the soul in nature by labor. 

Politics is the activity of the soul illustrated in power. 

Manners are silent and mediate expressions of soul. 

Note 1. This is the upshot of Emerson's conception of His- 
tory as a process. It is of course precisely the opposite of the 
ordinary notion of the subject. History is studied mainly to 
provide perspective and to help in distinguishing the great from 
the small. In Uses of Great Men he says: "The genius of 
humanity is the right point of view of history. . . . Once you 
saw phoenixes: they are gone; the world is not therefore dis- 
enchanted. . . . We have never come at the true and best 
benefit of any genius so long as we believe him an original force. 
In the moment when he ceases to help us as a cause, he begins 
to help us more as an effect. Then he appears as an exponent 
of a vaster mind and will. The opaque self becomes transparent 
with the light of the First Cause." In Shakspeare : or, The Poet: 
" We are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle 
of parentage, birth, birth-place, schooling, schoolmates, earning 
of money, marriage, publication of books, celebrity, death; and 
when we have come to an end of this gossip, no ray of relation 
appears between it and the goddess-born. " 

Note 2. This is characteristic. It reflects Emerson's reading 
in Oriental, Greek, and Old English literature. There is in it Pla- 
tonic reminiscence, eastern and Teutonic mysticism. 

Note 3. See Nature, and the duality of nature touched upon 
in Compensation. 

Note 4. The word " consist " is used in its strict etymological 
sense and gives a startling emphasis to the idea. 

Note 5. The paradox of dealing with exceptions and crises 
as being of the essence of nature is not merely verbal with 
Emerson. A similar principle animated the great scientist who 
advised, " Study the waste" for the key to discovery. 

Note 6. See Self -Reliance. 

Note 7. An example of the way in which the vague associa- 
tions connected with a name may be made to rivet attention to 
a thought. One Hasdrubal died 207 b. c, and according to Livy 
his head was thrown into the camp of his brother Hannibal. 
Another died 221 b. c, assassinated by a slave whose master he 
had put to death. A third Hasdrubal was commander in the 
war against Masinissa, 150 b. c. After an obstinate resistance 



NOTES 293 

he surrendered to Scipio, and was allowed to live in honorable 
captivity; but his wife upbraided him for his surrender and 
threw herself and her children into the flames in the temple 
where they had taken refuge. 

Note 8. Cesare Borgia, 1478-1507, a man of personal 
beauty, a patron of learning, a resolute soldier, and a master of 
cruel perfidy, lived violently, died in war, and was celebrated 
as a model ruler by Macchiavelli in II Principe. Few persons 
have vivid memories of this, but the names impress. 

Note 9. Reminiscent of Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations 
of Immortality : — 

"At length the Man perceives it die away 
And fade into the light of common day." 

Note 10. This recalls the aesthetic theory of Kant. The 
"note of the universal" is really this taking for granted our 
own competence. We cannot imagine any dissent from our 
opinions or our pleasures or our virtues when we are really en- 
gaged with works of any sort of art that makes its own appeal. 

Note 11. The position of the adjectives after the noun illus- 
trates the way in which the rhythm of the sentence influenced 
Emerson's style. 

Note 12. See Joshua, x, 12: "Stand thou still upon Gib- 
eon." 

Note 13. The note in the Centenary Edition suggests in- 
accuracy here : — 

"lam indebted to Professor Charles Eliot Norton for calling 
my attention to the probable compounding of the name Marma- 
duke Robinson, through a slip of Mr. Emerson's memory, out of 
the names of the two Quakers hung on Boston Common in 1659, 
Marmaduke Stevenson and William Robinson." 

Note 14. Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument in Salisbury 
Plain, Wiltshire: it seems to have consisted of two concentric cir- 
cles of upright stones inclosing two ellipses. The Ohio circles are 
aboriginal fortifications on the Scioto River, twenty-six miles 
south of Columbus. Mexico is a way of suggesting the interest- 
ing features of native Aztec civilization. Memphis is the early 
capital of Egvpt. 

Note 15. Belzoni, Giovanni Battista, 1778-1823, an Italian 
traveler, explorer, and athlete (at Astley's, London). He 
transferred the bust of the so-called Young Memnon from 
Thebes to the British Museum. 

Note 16. One of the most important and least appreciated 
of Emerson's contributions to the natural history of thinking. 

Note 17. The word was introduced into philosophy by 
Giovanni Bruno to denote the minimum parts of substances, 
supposed by him to be at once psychical and material. Leibnitz 
conceived the monad as absolutely unextended substance exist- 
ing in space, its existence consisting in its activities, which are 
ideas; and the universe was, in his belief, made up of such ideas. 



294 NOTES 

The history of each monad followed an internal law, and all in- 
tercourse between the monads was impossible; but there was 
a preestablished harmony between these laws of the different 
monads. The term is applied in biology to any simple single- 
celled organism. Huxley says: " There is reason to think that cer- 
tain organisms which pass through a monad stage of existence 
. . . are, at one time of their lives, dependent upon external 
sources for their protein matter, or are animals; and, at an- 
other period, manufacture it, or are plants." 

Note 18. This use instead of brutality is rare. The Century 
Dictionary cites another instance from Spenser's Faerie Queene, 
II, viii, 12. 

Note 19. This is not a precise statement. Io appears in 
the Prometheus as a fair woman with a heifer's horns. 

Note 20. Herodotus wrote a history of the Persian inva- 
sion of Greece. Thucydides began a history of the Pelopon- 
nesian War. Xenophon described the expedition of the ten 
thousand Greeks to the Black Sea. Plutarch, author of Forty- 
six Parallel Lives of Greeks and Romans. 

Note 21. Cf. Papers from The Dial, particularly "Thoughts 
on Modern Literature," "Europe and European Books," "Past 
and Present," and "A Letter." 

Note 22. Another famous description of sculpture is " frozen 
music." 

Note 23. Cf. "Xenophanes" in Poems. 

Note 24. It is hardly possible that Emerson had not in 
mind while writing this sentence the remarkable natural forma- 
tion in the White Mountains known as " The Old Man of the 
Mountain." 

Note 25. This reference has a peculiarly personal emphasis, 
as shown by the note in the Centenary Edition : — 

" In the month of April, 1839, Carlyle sent Raphael Morghen's 
engraving of the Aurora, by Guido in the Rospigliosi palace 
in Rome, to Mr. Emerson, saying, " It is my wife's memorial 
to your wife. . . . Two houses divided by wide seas are to 
understand always that they are united nevertheless." The pic- 
ture still hangs in the parlor of Mr. Emerson's home, with the 
inscription which accompanied it : ' Will the lady of Concord 
hang up this Italian sun-chariot somewhere in her Drawing 
Room, and, looking at it, think sometimes of a household here 
which has good cause never to forget hers. T. Carlyle.' 

" Mr. Emerson used to point out to his children how the 
varied repetition of the manes, heads, and prancing forefeet 
of the horses were imitations of the curved folds of a great 
cumulus cloud." 

Note 26. Roos, Johann Heinrich, 1631-1685, a German 
painter of animals. 

Note 27. A similar claim is made by Ruskin for a certain 
type of artist. 

Note 28. This is to all intents a quotation from himself. 
He has made the sentiment his own in theory and in practice. 



NOTES 295 

Note 29. See the essays on "Art" (Essays, First Series, 
and Society and Solitude) and "The Problem" in Poems. 

Note 30. The cathedral of Strassburg is fabled to have been 
begun in 600. When the great wooden tower burned down, Erwin, 
an architect, was employed to restore it. He began the work 
of restoration in 1227, but did not live to complete it. His sons 
Johannes and Erwin carried on the work from his drawings, 
which are still at Strassburg. The facade, the galleries, and 
the rose windows are of great beauty. 

Note 31. See Hamlet, III, ii. 

Note 32. This derivation of an architectural feature from 
a snow landscape is unusual. The arching of trees has been sug- 
gested for the origin of the pointed arch, the lotus and the 
acanthus have served as factors in art systems, but what may 
be called the architecture of snow and ice is not a common 
factor in explanation. The suggestion is worked out elaborately 
in Whittier's Snow-Bound, and delicately in the second prelude 
in Lowell's Vision of Sir Launfal. 

Note 33. See "The Snow-Storm" in Poems. 

Note 34. Heeren, Arnold Hermann Ludwig, 1760-1842, a 
German historian, professor of philosophy and history at 
Gottingen. 

Note 35. A river of Ethiopia mentioned by Strabo. C. E. 

Note 36. See De Quincey's Flight of a Tartar Tribe. 

Note 37. This active transitive use of the verb is vigorous 
and smacks of the market. The force is much greater than if 
some ethical or literary word had been used. 

Note 38. This is rather half-hearted. The Germans do not 
say Fore-World but Vorwelt. 

Note 39. The force of "costly" here seems to He in the price 
that is paid in effort to get back to the simple, and also perhaps 
in the distaste we may acquire for newer literature. 

Note 40. See Whistler's Ten O'clock, also Kipling's The Co- 
nundrum of the Workshops. 

Note 41. A famous Greek archer in the Trojan war. He 
was friend and armor-bearer to Hercules. Hero of a play by 
Sophocles. 

Note 42. Dr. Richard Moulton puts the distinction between 
the Greek-classic and English-romantic as being the effort to 
keep as much as possible out (the classic) and to get as much 
as possible in (the romantic). 

Note 43. This judgment has been abundantly justified by 
recent criticism and discoveries in archaeology. Classic and 
romantic are descriptions of stages and attitudes of all art 
rather than of fixed times or localities. 

Note 44. See Shakespeare's Macbeth, I, iii. 

Note 45. Menu or Manu. In Sanskrit "man," one of a class 
of demiurgic beings, each of whom presides over a Manvantara, 
or period of Manu. 

Note 46. Simeon, d. 459, a Syrian ascetic who spent the 



296 NOTES 

last thirty years of his life on a pillar near Antioch. The Thebais, 
a Greek epic of the Theban cycle and of unknown authorship; 
the theme, a mythical war between Argos and Thebes. Capu- 
chins, a mendicant order of Franciscan monks, founded in 
Italy in 1528 by Matteo di Bassi, and named from the long 
capouch, or cowl, which they wore. They were to live by beg- 
ging, were not to use gold or silver or silk in decoration of their 
altars, and the chalices were to be of pewter. 

Note 47. A member of the learned and priestly caste in Per- 
sia. Brahmin, member of the highest or priestly caste of India. 
Druid, a priest of the ancient Celts. Inca, a chief or lord in an- 
cient Peru. 

Note 48. Son of Poseidon and Libya, a deity of several 
primitive nations. 

Note 49. Champollion, Jean Francois, 1790-1832, a cele- 
brated French archaeologist, Orientalist, and explorer. He dis- 
covered the key to the Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions. 

Note 50. An Indian town in Mexico. The tall mound was 
probably an ancient settlement on a base of sun-dried bricks, 
with a second platform of less extent and greater elevation, 
and a central mound the average elevation of which is now 
one hundred and seventy feet. 

Note 51. A tragedy of iEschylus. Emerson means that the 
form of the work of art adds beauty to a process which is 
usually considered destructive and hideous. 

Note 52. Orpheus was the son of Apollo or a Thracian 
river-god. He could charm all animate and inanimate things 
with his music. " Riddle " is here used as a synonym for mean- 
ing. Cf. ''Come riddle me my riddle." 

Note 53. See Plato's Phcedrus, the myth of the charioteer 
and the vision of truth. The entire paragraph is very Platonic. 
See Intellect, Essays, "First Series," Cent. Ed., pp. 335-7. 

Note 54. Cf. James Russell Lowell's Extreme Unction. 

Note 55. The third act of the Second Part of Goethe's 
Faust is known in Germany as "the Helena." It is an inde- 
pendent poem dealing with Helen of Troy interpolated by 
Goethe very loosely into the drama of Faust. 

Note 56. Chiron was a centaur, son of Kronos and Philyra. 

Note 57. Imaginary creatures, part lion, part eagle. 

Note 58. Three daughters of Darkness (Phorkys) and the 
Abyss (Keto). One of the forms in which Mephistopheles ap- 
pears in the Second Part of Faust. 

Note 59. The wife of Tyndareus, and mother of Helen, 
Clytemnestra, Castor and Pollux. 

Note 60. The relation of modern science to obscure and 
occult practices of an earlier age was doubtless in Emerson's 
mind. Astronomy is astrology transformed, chemistry owes 
much to alchemy, and botany to the herbalist. One aspect 
of this relation is well set forth in Kipling's Puck of Pook's 
Hill, in the story entitled "The Joyous Venture." 



NOTES 297 

Note 61. Perceforest, a mediaeval French romance, the 
scene in Britain before the time of Arthur. Amadis de Gaul, 
a romance of the fourteenth century by Vasco de Lobeira of 
Portugal. 

Note 62. See ballad in Percy's Reliques; or in Sargent and 
Kittredge, English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 

Note 63. That is, he is the heir of all the ages. 

Note 64. This passage is part of a lecture on "The Doc- 
trine of the Hands," given in the course on Human Culture in 
1837-38. This is the relativity of things so ever present in 
Emerson's thought. 

Note 65. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Pt. I, II, iii. 

Note 66. Laplace, Pierre Simon, Marquis de, 1749-1827, 
celebrated French astronomer and mathematician. 

Note 67. The use of " prophesied " here is very characteristic 
of Emerson's diction and his habit of thought. The word sug- 
gests more than he needs to say, but it gives dignity and scope 
and a certain liberality of attitude to the reader's mind. The 
ordinary term would be "implied" or "called for" or even 
"necessitated." 

Note 68. Davy, Sir Humphry, 1778-1829, celebrated Eng- 
lish chemist, inventor of the safety lamp. 

Note 69. Gay-Lussac, Joseph Louis (1778-1850), French 
chemist and physicist, made the first balloon ascension for 
scientific purposes in 1804. 

Note 70. Handel, George Frederick, 1685-1759, a cele- 
brated German composer of music. He is best known for his 
oratorios, among them " The Messiah." 

Note 71. There are two Whittemores, one Thomas (1800- 
1861), a Universalist preacher and ethical writer of Boston, Mass., 
compiler of Songs of Zion. In his youth he was "mechanic." 
The other, Amos, 1759-1826, an inventor who contrived a 
machine for puncturing the leather and setting the wire for 
cotton and wool cards. The efficient means out of one of his 
difficulties in this invention was revealed to him in a dream. 
In either case this name is an instance of the determined im- 
partiality of Emerson's mind. The rating of Whittemore with 
Watt, Fulton, and Arkwright is little short of absurd, judged 
in the light of their subsequent reputations, but taking the 
chance doubtless seemed a duty of the hour to Emerson. 

Note 72. This seems perhaps a concession to persons who 
have poor memories and cannot pass examinations, but Emer- 
son's alternative is so much more difficult that the conven- 
tional demands seem easy in comparison. Cf. The American 
Scholar I and II, part of which is: "Meek young men grow up 
in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which 
Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given; forgetful that 
Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when 
they wrote those books." 

Note 73. Cf. Robert Browning's Popularity, part of which 



298 NOTES 

" And there's the extract, flasked and fine, 

And priced and salable at last! 
And Hobbs, Nobbs, Stokes, and Nokes combine 

To paint the future from the past, 
Put blue into their line. 

41 Hobbs hints blue, — straight he turtle eats: 
Nobbs prints blue, — claret crowns his cup: 

Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats, — 
Both gorge. Who fished the murex up? 

What porridge had John Keats? " 

Note 74. An aboriginal inhabitant of the Hawaiian Islands. 

Note 75. See "Limits" in Poems; also Nature: "To speak 
truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not 
see the sun. ... In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, 
as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of his life 
is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth." Also 
Discipline: "The moral influence of nature upon every indi- 
vidual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him. 
Who can estimate this ? Who can guess how much firmness 
the sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman ? how much tran- 
quillity has been reflected to man from the azure sky, over 
whose unspotted deeps the winds forevermore drive flocks of 
stormy clouds, and leave no wrinkle or stain ? how much in- 
dustry and providence and affection we have caught from the 
pantomime of brutes ? What a searching preacher of self- 
command is the varying phenomenon of Health ?" Also the 
motto for Nature : — 

"A subtle chain of countless rings 
The next unto the farthest brings! 
The eye reads omens where it goes, 
And speaks all languages the rose, 
And, striving to be man, the worm 
Mounts through all the spires of form." 



POLITICS 

The account in the Centenary Edition gives these facts about 
the essay in the form in which it was published : — 

"This essay was based on a lecture in the Boston course of 
1839-40 on 'The Present Age.' The lecture on 'Polities' fol- 
lowed 'Literature' and preceded 'Reforms' and 'Religion.' 
Much new matter was added in the essay. Some passages that 
were omitted it seemed well to give in these notes. In this essay 
one sees Emerson fearlessly apply his doctrine of the Universal 
Mind, or the common sense of man, to politics, and find therein 
good hope for democracy. And his faith in evolution encourages 
a fearless optimism when at last in the nineteenth Christian 
century he has found one man — it does not appear whether 
himself or another — ' to whom no weight of adverse experience 



NOTES 299 

will make it for a moment impossible that thousands of human 
beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and sim- 
plest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.' " 

Note 1. Merlin or Myrddhin was a half -legendary bard of 
the sixth century. No authentic work of his remains. As a 
legendary figure he plays a part in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, 
and in Malory's Morte oV Arthur. The Early English Text So- 
ciety has published for the first time the Early English prose 
romance of Merlin, 1450-60, from the French original attributed 
to Robert de Borron. Borron's original was Geoffrey of Mon- 
mouth's Vita Merlini (1139), translated into French by Wace. 
The student should not be content with any characterization of 
Merlin that ignores this material. 

Note 2. Pisistratus, 605-527 b. c, a tyrant of Athens, friend 
of Solon. 

Note 3. Cromwell, 1599-1658, Lord Protector of the Com- 
monwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Carlyle's lecture 
on " The Hero As King, " in which he gave a place to Cromwell, 
had been delivered in 1840. Compare with the classification 
given in the Phcedrus of Plato, where the tyrant and the good king 
are opposed as examples of more or less disciplined and cultured 
wills, according to the share they had won of truth as opposed 
to mere will or passion. Jowett, Tr., p. 248. 

Note 4. A proverbial expression for profitless labor. Ocnus 
twisted a rope, an ass ate it. Proverbially also a feeble union 
or tie. 

Note 5. " Perishes in the twisting" is a variant of perishes 
in the using, to express an even briefer span of life. 

Note 6. The more usual expression would be "greater" or 
"more of." 

Note 7. "And" commonly connects similar types of speech. 
The use of brute as an adjective is archaic and gives dignity 
and force to the expression. 

Note 8. A Syrian, father-in-law of Jacob. See Genesis xxx, 5. 

Note 9. See The Fortune of the Republic: " The class of which 
I speak make themselves merry without duties. They sit in 
decorated club-houses in the cities, and burn tobacco and play 
whist; in the country they sit idle in stores and bar-rooms, and 
burn tobacco, and gossip and sleep." In nobler form the ideal 
objections were put in the form of experiments like those at 
Florence, Fruitlands, and Brook Farm. The purpose of the 
experiment may be said to be the higher life by way of agri- 
culture, self-culture, and communism. Emerson considered its 
claims as presented to him by ardent advocates and decided 
against joining them. In different places he has expressed him- 
self to the effect that he must "submit to the degradation of 
owning bank-stock and seeing poor men suffer," and that he 
did not " wish to remove from (his) my present prison to a prison 
a little larger." " I wish to break all prisons." " At the name of a 
society, all my quills rise and sharpen." " Diet, medicine, traffic, 



300 NOTES 

books, social intercourse, and all the rest of our practices and 
usages are equally divorced from ideas, are empirical and false. 
I should like to put all my practices back on their first thoughts, 
and do nothing for which I now ask the whole world for my 
reason. If there are -inconveniences and what is called ruin in 
the way, because we have so enervated and maimed ourselves, 
yet it would be like dying of perfumes to sink in the effort to 
reattach the deeds of every day to the holy and mysterious 
recesses of life." Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, J. E. Cabot, 
ii, 437. 

Note 10. The Century Dictionary gives two instances of the 
use of this word by Milton. See The Fortune of the Republic : 
"Our people are too slight and vain. . . . We import trifles, 
dancers, singers, laces, books of patterns, modes, gloves and 
cologne, manuals of Gothic architecture, steam-made orna- 
ments." 

Note 11. This is a variation in English of the Latin res 
nolunt diu male administrari, with its legal associations. 

Note 12. This paragraph from the lecture was omitted here: 

" The philosopher, who is never to stop at the outside or ap- 
pearance of things, will find more to justify his faith in the har- 
mony of politics with the constitution of man, than the mere 
statute-book can furnish him. There is more history to a nation 
than can be gathered from its code. Its code is only the high- 
water mark showing how high the last tide rose, but at this 
moment perhaps the waters rise higher still, only they have not 
yet notched their place by a line of pebbles, shells, and seaweed. 
Observe that the law is always the last and never the first step. 
One person, a few persons, an increasing minority do the thing; 
defend it; irresistibly urge it; until finally, against all reluctance, 
roaring opposition, it becomes the law of the land. The thing 
goes before, — the form comes after. The elements of power, 
namelv, persons and property, must and will have their just 
sway." C. E. 

Note 13. See The American Scholar: "The world of any 
moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some 
fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, 
is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, 
as if all depended on this particular up or down. . . . Let him 
not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient 
and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. . . . 
Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure that 
prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. ... He learns 
that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is 
master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and 
of all into whose language his own can be translated." This is the 
aspect of self-reliance to which Emerson most often recurs, but 
it is presented under a different guise — that of group efficiency." 

Note 14. The original lecture had from this point the mate- 
rial supplied by the Centenary Edition, as follows: — 



NOTES 301 

"It seems to follow from these doctrines that nothing is less 
important than the laws or forms of government. Power be- 
longs to persons and to property. Property is merely the obe- 
dience of nature to human labor and follows of course the moral 
quality of the persons who create and hold it. With the progress 
of any society, with the cultivation of individuals, the existing 
forms become every day of less consequence. Every addition 
of good sense that a citizen acquires destroys so much of his 
opposition to the laws of nature and the well-being of soci- 
ety, and of course brings the power of his property on the side 
of justice. Knowledge transfers the censorship from the State 
House to the reason of every citizen, and compels every man to 
mount guard over himself, and puts shame and remorse for 
sergeants and maces. And we find in all times and countries 
every great man does, in all his nature, point at and imply the 
existence and well-being of all the orders and institutions of a 
state. He is full of reverence. He is by inclination (how far 
soever in position) the defender of the grammar-school, the 
almshouse, the holy day, the church, the priest, the judge, the 
legislator, the executive arm. Throughout his being is he loyal, 
even when by circumstance arrayed in opposition to the actual 
order of tilings. Such was Socrates, St. Paul, Luther, Milton, 
Burke. 

"The education of every man is bringing him ever to post- 
pone his private to the universal good, to comport himself, 
that is, in his proper person, as a state, and of course whilst the 
whole community around him are doing the like, the persons 
who hold public offices become mere clerks of business, in no 
sense the sovereigns of the people. 

" It were very much to be wished that these laws drawn from 
the nature of things could become a part of the popular philoso- 
phy, that at least all endeavors for the reform of education or 
the reform of political opinion might be made where only they 
can have any avail, in the speculative views of the individual, 
for it was justly said by Bacon that the speculative opinions 
of men in general between the age of thirty and forty were the 
only sure source of political prophecy. The philosophy of pro- 
perty, if explored in its foundations, would open new mines of 
practical wisdom, which would in the event change the face of 
the world; would destroy the whole magazine of dissimulation, 
for so many ages reckoned the capital art of Government. It 
would purge that rottenness which has defamed the whole 
Science until politic has come to mean cunning; would show the 
pretenders in that science that they were their own dupes; 
would show that the cunningest man cannot cheat nature or do 
any wrong without suffering the same. It would go deep into 
ethics and touch all the relations of man. It would teach the 
subtle and inextricable compensation that attaches to property. 
Every tiling God hath made hath two faces. Every cent in a 
dollar covers its worth, and also covers its evil. The man who 



302 NOTES 

covets the wealth of London should know that whilst each 
pound and penny represents so much commodity, so much corn 
and wine and cloth, of necessity it also represents so much mould 
or sourness and moth as belongs to these commodities: if so 
much property, then so much risk; if so much power, then so 
much danger; if so much revenue, then so much tax. When 
his honest labor and enterprise attract to him a great estate, 
then his exertions stand over against his gains to make him 
whole. But could his wish without his honest labor transfer out 
of another's vaults a million pounds sterling into his own chest, 
so would also, against his wish, just so massive an ill will and 
fear concentrate its black rays on him in darkness that might 
be felt. All property must and will pay its tax. If it come not 
by fair means, then it comes by foul. The wise man who sees 
the unerring compensations which worked themselves out in the 
world, will pay the state its full dividend on his estate, if not 
for love of right, then for fear of harm. 

"And as in respect to property, so also in respect to persons 
it takes an ounce to balance an ounce ; the fair house of Seem is 
never an equivalent for the house of Be. Nor can the loudest 
Pretension supply the place of the smallest piece of Perform- 
ance. A just view of human nature would convince men of that 
truth (how hard to learn) that it is the man makes the place. 
Alfred, Washington, Lafayette, appear half divine to the people 
followed in their office by a nation's eye. Ambitious but pitiful 
persons see them and think it is the place alone that makes them 
great, and that if they sat in the same chairs they would be as 
much admired. All means are used to this end; all sorts of shame 
accumulated; and by and by perhaps they sit in the high seat 
only to make subtleness and pitifulness quite bare to the view 
of all men. 

"In our own times, without satire, this mistake is so com- 
mon that all society and government seems to be making be- 
lieve, when we see such ignorant persons with a grave coun- 
tenance taking their places as legislators and statesmen. This 
could not be, but that at intervals throughout society there are 
real men intermixed, whose natural basis is broad enough to 
sustain the paper men in common times, as the carpenter puts 
one iron rod in his banister to five or six wooden ones. But in- 
exorable time, which brings opportunity once to every man, 
brings also to every man the hour of trial to prove him whether 
he is genuine, or whether he is counterfeit. 

"The last ages have been characterized in history by the 
immense creation of property. The population of the globe, 
by the nations of western Europe in whom the superiority of 
intellect and organization seems to reside, has set at work so 
many skilful hands that great wealth is added. Now no dollar 
of property is created without some direct communication with 
nature, and of course some acquisition of knowledge and prac- 
tical power. The creation of all this property, and that by mil- 



NOTES 303 

lions, not by a few, involves necessarily so much education of 
the minds of the proprietors. With power always comes the 
consciousness of power, and therefore indomitable millions 
have demanded forms of government more suited to the facts. 
Throughout Europe, throughout America, the struggle exists 
between those who claim new forms at all hazards, and those 
who prefer the old forms to the hazard of change. Of course 
on the whole is a steady progress of innovation. In London, 
they write on the fences, ' Of what use are the Lords?' In Spain 
and in Portugal, the liberal monarchists can scarce hold out 
against the mob. The South American States are too unsettled 
than that an ordinary memory can keep the run of the powers 
that be. 

" The era seems marked in many countries by the separa- 
tion of real power from its forms, and the continual interfer- 
ence of the popular opinion between the executive and its will. 
A levity before unknown follows. The word 'Revolution' is 
stripped of its terrors, and they may have many in a year. 
They say in Paris, There will be no revolution to-day, for it 
rains. 

" The struggle is envenomed by the great admixture of igno- 
rance and selfishness on both sides which always depraves 
human affairs, and also prevents the war from being one purely 
of ideas. The innovators are led not by the best, but by the 
boldest, and often by the worst, who drive their private trade 
on, take advantage of the march of the principle. The conser- 
vatives make up for weakness by wiles and oppose indiscrimi- 
nately the good and evil measures of their antagonists. Mean- 
time Party, that bellowing hound that barks or fawns, that 
defamer and bargainer and unreasoning self-lover, distorts all 
facts and blinds all eyes. Party counts popularity success. 
Its whole aim ever is to get the hurrah on our side. It infects 
from the bar-room and ward-caucus up, all the veins of the 
state, stealing even into literature and religion; and in our age 
every Party has written history for itself as Gibbon, Lingard, 
Brodie, Hume, Hallam, Mitford. 

"Meantime if we rise above the hubbub of parties, and the 
uncovered selfishness of many of the actors, we shall see that 
humanity is always the gainer, that the production of property 
has been the education of the producers, that the creation of 
so many new households and so many forcible and propertied 
citizens, has been the creation of lovers of order, knowledge 
and peace, and hating war. Trade and war are always antago- 
nists. The progress of trade has been the death of war, uni- 
versally. In these days nations have stretched out the hand 
to each other. In our times, it is said for the first time, has 
the word 'International' been compounded. Some progress 
has been made by national compact in hindering offences 
against all the world, as piracy and kidnapping. Mediation is 
made to supersede armies and navies. The projects with which 



304 NOTES 

the minds of philanthropists teem, are themselves a sure mark 
of progress. The black colony at Liberia, the proposition of the 
congress of nations to arbitrate controversies arising between 
two states, and so to prevent war or at least aid the right cause 
by the moral force of a decision, these are projects the bare 
starting of which in any practicable shape, proves civilization 
and Christianity. The mutual helpfulness of nations and the 
sympathy of all in the projects of each and the continual ap- 
proximation by means of mechanical improvements seem to 
point at stricter union and simpler legislation, at a legislation 
more purely official, such as shall not hold out such bribes to 
vanity and avarice. 

" The philosopher must console himself amidst the harsh dis- 
cord of what is called politics by the reflection that its errors, 
like the errors of the planets, are periodic; that a firm bound 
is set by counterchecks in man to every excess, that the dis- 
cipline which the events of every day administer to every man, 
tend always to make him a better citizen, and to make him 
independent of the mutations of parties and states." 

A comparison of these two endings is important as showing 
the different tone of Emerson's spoken and printed estimate of 
institutions. The mood of the second is much more confident 
and is certainly spiritually optimistic. In the first the doubt 
is at least suggested that law is the creature of a force, as ma- 
levolent as controlling. In short the first has the emphasis of a 
half-truth put as if it were a truth and a half. In the delivery 
it was doubtless ameliorated and chastened by Emerson's per- 
sonality and the beneficence of his bearing. 

Note 15. On the occasion of the passage of the Fugitive Slave 
Law, Emerson said in a wonderful address, part of which is 
here cited from the Centenary Edition : — 

" The last year has forced us all into politics. There is infamy 
in the air. I wake in the morning with a painful sensation which 
I carry about all day, and which, when traced home, is the 
odious remembrance of that ignominy which has fallen on Mas- 
sachusetts. I have lived all my life in this State and never had 
any experience of personal inconvenience from the laws until 
now. They never came near me to my discomfort before. But 
the Act of Congress of September 18th, 1850, is a law which every 
one of you will break on the earliest occasion, — a law which no 
man can obey, or abet the obeying, without loss of self-respect and 
forfeiture of the name of a gentleman." 

Note 16. See Burke's Observations on a late Publication: 
" Party divisions, whether on the whole operating for good or 
evil, are things inseparable from free government." 

Note 17. This is unusually severe characterization. It must 
be taken rather as the expression of Emerson's attitude towards 
all radicalism as such, than as a condemnation of American 
radicalism in comparison with American excess of any other 
kind. It is the lack of love that Emerson deplores, and he for- 
gets that he has not proved the facts on radicalism in America. 



NOTES 305 

Note 18. A penal colony on an inlet of the eastern coast of 
New South Wales, Australia, five miles south of Sidney, sent out 
1787-88 from England, but later transferred to Port Jackson. 

Note 19. Fisher Ames, 1758-1808, Dedham, Mass., orator, 
statesman, and political philosopher. Federal member of Con- 
gress from Massachusetts, 1789-97. He declined the presidency 
of Harvard College. 

Note 20. This is a beautiful expression of a very ugly fact, 
and one that Emerson particularly regretted when it came 
under his notice. Yet as an admirer of force and individuality, 
he always paid his tribute to efficient assertion of the moment's 
duty. He understood the honor there could be among thieves. 
Yet this is an overstatement. It is not really the want of liberty 
that strengthens law and decorum. 

Note 21. A term said to be derived from Charles Lynch, 
1736-1796, a Virginia planter, who with two neighbors under- 
took to secure order by punishing offenders with stripes or 
banishment without process of law. 

Note 22. This is a brief review of the theories of govern- 
ment presented in Aristotle's treatises, Plato's characterization, 
and based on an ideal principle thoroughly Platonic in its inter- 
pretation of the course of political experiment. See Welldon 's 
Politics of Aristotle and Jowett's Plato's Republic. 

Note 23. At this passage the Centenary Edition supplies 
the following : — 

" Mr. Cabot, in the Appendix F to his Memoir, giving an 
account of the lecture ' Politics,' printed the following passage 
as omitted in the essay. I cannot find it in the manuscript, and 
suppose it may have dropped out : — 

"'The State and Church guard their purlieus with jealous 
decorum. I sometimes wonder where their books find readers 
among mere mortals, who must sometimes laugh, and are liable 
to the infirmity of sleep. Yet politics rest on real foundations 
and cannot be treated with levity. But the foundation is not 
numbers or force, but character. Men do not see that all force 
comes from this, and that the disuse of force is the education 
of men to do without it. Character is the true theocracy. It 
will one day suffice for the government of the world. Abso- 
lutely speaking, I can only work for myself. The fight of Leoni- 
das, the hemlock of Socrates, the cross of Christ, is not personal 
sacrifice for others, but fulfils a high necessity of his proper 
character : the benefit to others is merely contingent.' " 

Note 24. Compare with the analysis of the relation between 
liberty and taxing given by Burke in the Speech on Conciliation 
with America : " Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, 
is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object, and 
every nation has formed to itself some favorite point, which by 
way of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness. It 
happened, you know, Sir, that the great contests for freedom 
in this country were from the earliest times chiefly upon the 
question of taxing." 



306 NOTES 

Note 25. This is intended to supply an emphasis for the two 
sentences of conclusion rather than to delay thought upon itself. 
Emerson thinks of the beatitude of men when relations are 
angelic, memory myrrh, and presence frankincense and flowers; 
he does not literally prescribe personal isolation as a means to 
the end. At most he suggests the limited nature of personal 
relations. But the saying sounds stern and cold — to the unre- 
flecting — cool possibly to the most reflective. 

Note 26. Malthus, Thomas Robert, 1766-1834, an English 
political economist, known for his Principle of Population, 1798, 
which he states to be that population increases in a geometri- 
cal ratio, means of subsistence in an arithmetical ratio, and that 
vice and crime are necessary checks of this increase in numbers. 

Note 27. Ricardo, David, 1772-1823, an English Jew cele- 
brated for his original and influential treatment of economic 
problems. One of his books is Political Economy and Taxation. 

Note 28. A valuable publication originated by Robert 
Dudley at the suggestion of Burke, who was for some years 
editor and principal contributor. The years from 1758 to 1790 
cover the first series. It is still proceeding. 

Note 29. Brockhaus's Conversations-Lexikon, a German En- 
cyclopaedia, extensive in range and precise in information. 

Note 30. See " Fragments on the Poet" in Poems. 

Note 31. A reminiscence of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and its 
clothes vocabulary. 

Note 32. See Genesis iii, 7. Professor Woodberry, in Ralph 
Waldo Emerson, p. 186, says: "The secret of his style is in dic- 
tion. It may be described as seventeenth-century diction." 
The secret of this passage is adequately revealed by this char- 
acterization. 

Note 33. The ordinary word here would be " consciousness; " 
greater force and the entire charm of the passage is gained 
from Emerson's variation. 

Note 34. Compare this phrase, its meaning and associations, 
with the "perfect moment" of Walter Pater. The perfect mo- 
ment is one of the experiences of Marius the Epicurean in Pater's 
study of that name. The renunciation, the restraint implied 
in it, are well fitted to bring out the full flavor of the suspicion 
Emerson expresses about " the splendid." 

Note 35. "Not all there" is the homely phrase by which 
New Englanders describe the mentally deficient. The suggestion 
adds point to the awkwardness of ability in conventional so- 
ciety. 

Note 36. This is a brilliantly suggestive characterization, 
but its meaning is elusive. What class of forest animals has 
nothing but a prehensile tail? Is it apes or snakes, or may he 
invent an imaginary creature to meet our needs? 

Note 37. This is a curious phrase. The meaning seems to be 
"as far as code is concerned" or in the colloquial phrase "for 
all the code," i. e. " in spite of" or " without." 



NOTES 307 

Note 38. This would seem more precisely expressed by 
"useless," but the use of " hopeless" makes the sentence dra- 
matic within its own structure — competition is presented as 
without hope. 

Note 39. An old-fashioned structure of the phrase. 

Note 40. The earlier form of tins substituted "fate" for 
"faith." C.E. 

Note 41. This expresses Emerson's characteristic opposi- 
tion to the classic conception of form and limit as imposed 
by the nature of things. In the Laws Plato sets forth the pre- 
cise limits of the successful city state (Laws, Bk. V, 738. 
Jowett, Tr.) . Few critics of institutions are free from the dread 
that they may be "too large." Perhaps still fewer can really 
subscribe to the truth of Emerson's closing sentence. How 
many dare act on it? Yet even Emerson did not always 
strike this note. In Nominalist and Realist he says in a quite 
different connection: "Though the uninspired man certainly 
finds persons a conveniency in household matters, the divine 
man does not respect them: he sees them as a rack of clouds, 
or a fleet of ripples which the wind drives over the surface 
of the water. But this is flat rebellion. Nature will not be 
Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher 
in every moment with a million of fresh particulars." The view 
of property formally presented by Emerson in this essay may be 
well compared with a few sentences from Shaler's " The Individ- 
ual " (Appleton), p. 135 et seq. "The possession and the sense 
of property, both essentially features of human society, have 
in certain ways been very effective in promoting the develop- 
ment of sympathy, though, like war, it has had at the same time 
a limiting effect on the range of the emotion. The first effect 
of the property sense is, of course, hedonistic, purely selfish; 
but more than any other influence, it has in a secondary way 
served to create a sense of the rights of others, to make men 
put themselves in the place of the neighbor. The very corner- 
stone of human society is an understanding of the fellow creature. 
It is .clear that this sense has come forth from the earliest of 
them, i. e. the right of each man to his own possessions. In 
such ways as these the conception of the kindred man, as like 
one's self, has been greatly fostered by the development of 
social institutions." Far more congenial to this view of property 
and its influence are the positions held and set forth in Emer- 
son's sympathetic essay on Wealth in Conduct of Life. In the 
motto to this essay : — ■ 

" But, though light-headed man forget, 
Remembering Matter pays her debt : 
Still, through her motes and masses, draw 
Electric thrills and ties of Law, 
Which bind the strengths of Nature wild 
To the conscience of a child." 



• 



308 NOTES 

Finally in in Imperial Rescript by Kipling appears another 
version of the matter, in part : — 

"And over the German benches the bearded whisper ran : — 
Lager, der girls and der dollars, dey makes or dey breaks a man. 
If Schmitt haf collared der dollars, he collars der girls dere mit ; 
But if Schmitt bust in der pizness, we collars der girl from Schmitt." 



BEHAVIOR 

This essay is from a course of lectures on The Conduct of 
Life read to audiences in 1851, some time after Mr. Emerson's 
return from a stay of nine months in England. The publication 
of the book called out varied and somewhat contradictory 
opinions. The introduction to the volume in the Centenary 
Edition gives a full and valuable account of the important 
circumstances attending the course of lectures as well as the 
publication of the book. Two other volumes of Emerson's 
essays are closely related to this essay, Representative Men and 
English Traits. The essays Behavior and Manners are links 
in the chain from causes to events that reaches from the soul 
to men and their doings. 

The motto well expresses in the closing couplet Emerson's 
attitude toward the conventional claims of behavior. 

" The much deceived Endymion 
Slips behind a tomb." 

His explanation of the enduring deception is to be found in 
the suggestions of a note in the Centenary Edition : — 

" How near to what is good is what is fair! 
Which we no sooner see, 
But with the lines and outward air 
Our senses taken be." 

"These lines of Jonson express the charm which the graces 
had for the solitary New England scholar who believed him- 
self sadly deficient in them. He used these verses as the motto 
to what a writer in a recent journal has called " his fine essay 
on Manners, which was the first study for his finer essay on 
Behavior." The allusion, in the last lines of the motto of this 
essay, to Endymion, whom sleeping the moon stooped to kiss, 
leaving the influence of that benediction while life lasted, is a 
statement of the author's own case. It recalls the opening verses 
of the 'Ode to Beauty,' written perhaps ten years earlier." 

Note 1. George Sand's novel Consuelo was one of the few 
novels read and valued by Mr. Emerson, who alludes to it in 
the essay on "Books," in Society and Solitude, and in Repre- 
sentative Men. C. E. 

Note 2. Talma, Francois Joseph, and Madame Vanhove, a 
French tragic actor and a French actress, his wife. The hus- 



NOTES 309 

band introduced upon the stage the custom of wearing the cos- 
tume of the period represented, was a critic of art, and friend 
of Napoleon. 

Note 3. Talma's work did not prevent Emerson from 
seeing the real man under "the arts." In Napoleon, or the 
Man of the World in Representative Men, he says: "Napoleon 
is thoroughly modern, and at the highest point of his fortunes 
has the very spirit of the newspapers. ... In short, when 
you have penetrated through all the circles of power and splen- 
dor, you were not dealing with a gentleman, at last, but with 
an impostor and a rogue; and he fully deserves the epithet* 
of Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter. ... So this 
exorbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished, and absorbed the 
power and existence of those who served him; and the universal 
cry of France and of Europe in 1814 was, Enough of him; ' Assez 
de Bonaparte! '" 

Note 4. See Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, III, i. 

Note 5. An example of the free way in which Emerson uses 
structure to suit Ms eyes rather than the gerund-grinders. 

Note 6. 

I care not how you are dressed, 
In coarsest weeds or in the best; 



But whether you charm me, 

Bid my bread feed and my fire warm me. 

"Destiny," Poems. 

Note 7. Asmodeus, a demon mentioned in the Book of 
Tobit in the Apocrypha, and in the Talmud. The keeping him 
out of mischief by setting him to spin sand into ropes is alluded 
to in several places in Mr. Emerson's work, as in Politics and 
Resources. In a fragment of verse he likens his own task of 
weaving his thoughts into a coherent tissue for an essay to 
that of this spirit. C. E. 

Note 8. This is a vigorous provincialism of the kind Emer- 
son delighted in. 

Note 9. A famous school or university in Rome established 
by Hadrian. Also a club in London established 1824. Finally 
a local library of Boston. 

Note 10. Titian, 1477-1576, a famous Venetian painter. 
He was portrait painter to the Doges. 

Note 11. Claverhouse, John Graham, Viscount Dundee, 
c. 1649-1689, a Scottish soldier employed to put down the 
Covenanters, fell in the victorious battle of Killiecrankie against 
William III. ^ The word " fop" has only relative significance as 
applied to him in this passage. He was a fierce soldier, but 
a precisian in forms, military and others. 

Note 12. The Centenary Edition notes that the passage 
is thought to allude to John Quincy Adams. 

Note 13. The Emir Abd-el-Kader, whose energy and cour- 
age made him for sixteen years a terror to the French army 



310 NOTES 

in Algiers, was finally captured in 1847. He became the friend 
of General Daumas, who edited an exceedingly interesting 
book entitled Les Chevaux du Sahara, in which he recorded 
what the Emir told him of the Arab horse, the tradition of his 
origin, the texts from the Koran concerning him, his breeding, 
treatment, and performance, and also of the customs and modes 
of thought and action of the Arabs of the Desert. Mr. Emer- 
son took great pleasure in this book. C. E. 

Note 14. See "The Initial, the Daemonic and the Celestial 
Love." In the Old English epic of Beowulf there is mention 
of a woman who would let no man look into her eyes except 
her husband. The English sonnets of the Elizabethan period 
speak of lovers looking babies in each other's eyes. See Robert 
Browning's Cristina : — 

" She never should have looked at me 

If she meant I should not love her! 
There are plenty . . . men, you call such, 

I suppose . . . she may discover 
All her soul to, if she pleases, 

And yet leave much as she found them: 
But I'm not so, and she knew it 

When she fixed me, glancing round them," et seq. 

Note 15. Cf. J. R. Lowell's Studies for Two Heads, part of 
which is : — 

"Her eye, — it seems a chemic test 

And drops upon you like an acid ; 
It bites you with unconscious zest, 

So clear and bright, so coldly placid; 
It holds y6u quietly aloof, 

It holds, — and yet it does not win you ; 
It merely puts you to the proof 

And sorts what qualities are in you; 
It smiles, but never brings you nearer, 

It lights, — her nature draws not nigh; 
'T is but that yours is growing clearer 

To her assays; — yes, try and try, 

You'll get no deeper than her eye." 

Note 16. The book of Winckelmann on Greek Art was often 
referred to by Mr. Emerson. Johann Caspar Lavater, the Swiss 
mystic, wrote a remarkable work on physiognomy in men and 
animals, in which he pushed his theories to a ludicrous extreme. 
His Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beforderung der Menschen- 
kenntniss und Menschenliebe was published in 1775-78. C. E. 

Note 17. Louis de Rouvroi, Duke of Saint-Simon, 1675- 
1755, a writer of interesting Memoires, which because of their 
bold and satirical character did not obtain full publication 
until 1829. Jean Francois Paulde Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, 1614- 
79, a man of loose morals but much ability, became Cardinal, 
and Archbishop of Paris. He had many vicissitudes of fortune, 
being an opponent of Richelieu and Mazarin, and had to take 



NOTES 311 

refuge in Spain for some years. His Memoires cover an inter- 
esting period. Pierre Louis, Count Roederer, 1754-1835, a man 
of letters who was a statesman of remarkable intelligence and 
address, which saved Mm, although of the moderate party, in 
the French Revolution, throughout which he was very active. 
Under Napoleon he occupied places of importance, but after 
the return of the Bourbons he devoted himself to literature. 
Among his writings are the Chronique de Cinquante Jours and 
Memoires pour servir a Vhistoire de la Societe polie en France. C. E. 

Note 18. Henry Richard Vassall Fox, third Baron Holland, 
1773-1840, an English politician, nephew of Charles James Fox. 

Note 19. The title of a powerful novel by Victor Hugo 
which appeared in 1831. 

Note 20. Northcote, Sir Stafford Henry, 1818-1887, an Eng- 
lish conservative statesman. 

Note 21. Fuseli was banished from Switzerland for some 
political indiscretion. His drawing was praised by Sir Joshua 
Reynolds, and in time he became professor of painting in the 
Academy. He wrote a Life of Reynolds. James Northcote, 
a pupil of Reynolds, became a portrait painter. His disposition 
and manners made him unpopular. C. E. 

Note 22. A man of a low caste performing the lowest menial 
services, literally " a drummer," the Pariahs being the hereditary 
drum-beaters. An outcast, a vagabond. De Quincey in Auto- 
biographic Sketches has a remarkable treatment and analysis 
of the underlying idea. Kipling's Without Benefit of Clergy 
is a contribution of astounding pathos to the literature of the 
subject. 

Note 23. Quoted from Pericles and Aspasia by Walter 
Savage Landor. For further characterization of the author 
see essay on Walter Savage Landor in the volume Natural 
History of Intellect and Other Papers. 

Note 24. An illustration of this generalization is found in 
Napoleon, the Man of the World : " Bonaparte was singularly 
destitute of generous sentiments. The highest-placed individual 
in the most cultivated age and population of the world, — he 
has not the mind of common truth and honesty. ... He is a 
boundless liar. . . . His manners were coarse. He treated 
women with low familiarity. He had the habit of pulling their 
ears and pinching their cheeks, when he was in good humor, 
and of pulling the ears and whiskers of men, and of striking 
and horseplay with them, to his last days. It does not appear 
that he listened at keyholes, or, at least, that he was caught 
at it." 

Note 25. Cf. the incisive passage in Carlyle's Sartor Resar- 
tus : " Often in my atrabiliar moods when I read of pompous 
ceremonials, Frankfort Coronations, Royal Drawing-rooms, 
Levees, Couchees; and how the ushers and macers and pursui- 
vants are all in waiting; how Duke this is presented by Archduke 
that, and Colonel A by General B, and innumerable Bishops, 



312 NOTES 

Admirals, and miscellaneous Functionaries, are advancing 
gallantly to the Anointed Presence; and I strive in my remote 
privacy, to form a clear picture of that solemnity, — on a sud- 
den, as by some enchanter's wand the — shall I speak it? — 
the clothes fly off the whole dramatic corps; and Dukes, Gran- 
dees, Bishops, Generals, Anointed Presence itself, every mother's 
son of them, stand straddling there, not a shirt on them; and 
I know not whether to laugh or weep. This physical or psy- 
chical infirmity, in which perhaps I am not singular, I have, 
after hesitation, thought right to publish for the solace of those 
afflicted with the like. . . . What would Majesty do, could 
such an accident befall in reality; should the buttons all simul- 
taneously start, and the solid wool evaporate in very Deed, 
as here in Dream ? Ach Gott! How each skulks into the near- 
est hiding-place; their high State Tragedy (Haupt und Staats- 
Action) becomes a Pickleherring-Farce to weep at, which is 
the worst kind of Farce; the tables (according to Horace), and 
with them, the whole fabric of Government, Legislation, Prop- 
erty, Police, and Civilized Society, are dissolved, in wails and 
howls. 

"Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw 
addressing a naked House of Lords ?" et seq. After reading this 
one is impressed with the force of Emerson's " treat these reputa- 
tions tenderly." 

Note 26. The reference is thought to be applicable to Mary 
Moody Emerson. 

Note 27. Journal, 1841. " Be calm, sit still in your chair, 
though the company be dull and unworthy. Are you not there ? 
There then is the choir of your friends ; for subtle influences are 
always arriving at you from them, and you represent them, do 
you not ? to all who stand here. 

"It is not a word that 'I am a gentleman, and the king is 
no more,' but is a fact expressed in every word between the 
king and a gentleman. " C. E. 

Note 28. This shows another of the harmful aspects of the 
compliancy so greatly disliked by Emerson. Woodberry says 
of him, p. 183: "In his personal nature there was a strain of 
haughtiness that belonged with the formality of his manners 
and his inherited pride, which underlay his independence and 
was in his blood; the superiority with which he looked upon 
both society and literature with confident criticism was allied 
to this." 

Note 29. Junius Fromziskers, 1589-1677, a German student 
of Teutonic languages. Milton was indebted to him for part 
of his interest in Anglo-Saxon character and expression. 

Note 30. See History, Note 49. 

Note 31. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, the German philosopher 
and correspondent of Goethe. 

Note 32. There is a similar plot admirably used by Prosper 
Merimee, in his " Federigo" in Dernieres Nouvelles. 



NOTES 313 

Note 33. The description of Sir Philip Sidney bears out this 
experience of Emerson's. 

Note 34. This was a favorite idea with Thomas Carlyle, ex- 
pressed in the " rest of the spinning top." The phrase recurs in 
Sartor Resartus. The Centenary Edition notes that Emerson 
wrote also, Journal, 1850: "My prayer to women would be, 
when the bell rings, when visitors arrive, sit like statues." 

Note 35. Compare the passage in "The Celestial Love" be- 
ginning, — 

For this is Love's nobility, — 

Not to scatter bread and gold. C. E. 

Note 36. This is of paradox all compact and is characteristic 
of the haughty strain, mentioned by Woodberry, in Emerson's 
make up. In the temper of Carlyle's discovery of motives, one 
wonders what would be the effect of a meeting between two 
persons each trying to put the other "in a good light" and each 
conscious of the other's effort. 

Note 37. "Hear what the morning says and believe that," 
was one of Mr. Emerson's finest utterances. There is a passage 
on morning influences in "Inspiration," in connection with 
Goethe's poem " Musagetes," in Letters and Social Aims. C. E. 

Note 38. The close of this essay links it with the one on 
Culture, which precedes it in Conduct of Life, and which sup- 
plies a steady undercurrent of suggestion and reminiscence. 



MANNERS 

In the course of lectures, "The Philosophy of History," given 
by Mr. Emerson in 1836-37, was one called Manners. In 1841- 
42, he gave a course on "The Times," of which this essay was 
one. There was also a lecture, Manners and Customs of New 
England, in the five on New England, and the same theme is 
treated in Behavior in Conduct of Life. The first part of the 
motto is from Ben Jonson's Masque, Love Freed from Ignorance 
and Folly ; the second from that of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue. 

Note 1. The use of " philosophical" here is intentionally and 
suggestively inaccurate. It illustrates again Emerson's sense 
of humor in connection with unpromising subjects. The primi- 
tive or the careless is hardly philosophical, but the results of the 
inconvenience may be borne in that temper. 

Note 2. See History, Note 15. 

Note 3. Borgu or Bussango, a kingdom in Sudan. It was in 
this country that Mungo Park met his death. See Blackwood's 
Magazine, 1899. 

Note 4. Tibbus, Tibus or Tabus (rock people). A Nigritian 
people of Tibesti in the Sahara, reaching south into the Sudan. 
They traffic by caravan across the Sahara. Described by Nach- 
tigal and Rohlfs. 



314 NOTES 

Note 5. Borneo, a state of the Sudan. It was at the height 
of its power at the close of the 16th century. It has been 
described by Barth, Nachtigal, and later French and German 
explorers. 

Note 6. This vigorous use of everyday English reminds the 
reader of Samuel Johnson and of Carlyle. This is more forceful 
English than the purist's advice. 

Note 7. Emerson's translation by way of reference is char- 
acteristic of his self-reliance. The phrase of course means "as 
it should be." An example of Emerson's quick insight into 
verbal suggestion. 

Note 8. " Gentilesse " means courtesy, delicacy; is obsolete, 
was used by Edmund Spenser and others. 

Note 9. See " Fragments on The Poet " in Poems. 

Note 10. This was a growing sentiment with the public of 
Emerson's time: Matthew Arnold gives somewhat satirical 
expression to it in making the aristocracy of England barbarians 
with physical prosperity for their chief interest. 

Note 11. A road to the west from Niagara River where, in 
1814, a battle was fought between the Americans and the 
British. 

Note 12. Lord Falkland, Lucius Cary, 1610-43, an Eng- 
lish politician and writer. He was member of Parliament and 
later Secretary of State. 

Note 13. Two Persian monarchs of the name of Sapor, of 
the dynasty of the Sassanidse, conquered the Roman emperors 
in battle in the third and fourth centuries a. d. C. E. 

Note 14. Ruy Diaz de Bivar in the eleventh century, the 
preux chevalier of Spain, in the struggle against the Moors, was 
celebrated in ancient chronicles, romances, and ballads. Southey 
from these materials composed his noble Chronicle of the Cid. 
Mr. Emerson liked to read passages from this to his children. 
Many of the ballads about the Cid are translated by.Lockhart 
in Spanish Ballads. C. E. 

Note 15. Another example of the independence of the usual 
tyranny of time natural to Emerson. This he shared with cer- 
tain poets and thinkers of mystic powers in all times. 

Note 16. These are terms in fencing, but doubtless Emerson 
was willing that they should carry a double burden of sugges- 
tion. 

Note 17. This is an unusual phrase in literature. It has its 
types in common speech, as " to bring clear or clean." In Shake- 
speare, Measure for Measure, I, 1, appears "that we may bring 
you something on your way." 

Note 18. Emerson does not often repeat a word after so 
brief an interval. 

The Centenary Edition notes that most of tins paragraph is 
taken from a lecture on Prudence in the course on " Human 
Culture," 1838. The original text is as follows: — 

" Thus we understand exceeding well in America the charm 



NOTES 315 

of what is best in English manners, and, as we by age, cultiva- 
tion, and leisure refine and ripen, come to set a high value on 
that species of breeding which foreigners, from a more sanguine 
temperament, and we too, from our democratic wantonness, 
usually blame in the English, — the mild, exact decorum, the 
cool recognition of all and any facts by a steadiness of temper 
which hates all starts, screams, faintings, sneezings, laughter, 
and all violence of any kind. The English, and we also, are a 
commercial people, great readers of newspapers and journals 
and books, and are therefore familiar with all the variety of 
tragic, comic, political tidings from all parts of the world, and 
are not to be thrown off their balance by any accident nearby, 
like villagers whom the overturn of a coach, or a robbery, or a 
dog with a kettle sets agape, and furnishes with gossip for a 
week." 

Note 19. This is a careless construction and unusually awk- 
ward in Emerson's writing. 

Note 20. A quarter of Paris, south of the Seine, celebrated 
as the headquarters of the royalists and long associated with 
wealth and fashion. 

Note 21. The battle which completed Napoleon's conquest 
of northern Italy, July 14, 1800. 

Note 22. The greatest naval victory of the British over 
Napoleon, Oct. 21, 1805. Nelson was first in command, Colling- 
wood was second. 

Note 23. The " only " here is out of place for the best effect 
of Emerson's sentence. The order should plainly be "only the 
day before yester that is city and court to-day." 

Note 24. An example of the fine and delicate humor char- 
acteristic of Emerson. 

Note 25. The reason for the use of this name as a place 
of banishment from society on account of offensive conduct is 
unknown. It was first used in military society to imply ex- 
clusion from the society of the mess. 

Note 26. A rare word meaning an obsequious follower of 
fashion. 

Note 27. The henchman of Mclvor in Scott's Waverley thus 
expresses his wish that the young English officer could see the 
chief at the head of his clan. C. E. 

Note 28. This is the favorite spiritual arithmetic of Emer- 
son. The half -gods go and the great gods come. But little men 
have a great impatience and resent such teaching as cold com- 
fort. It has its prototype, however, in the Calvinism that Emer- 
son always admired whether he believed it or not. In the "ap- 
plication" of the sermon of Jonathan Edwards from Ezekiel 
XIX, 12, "Her strong rods were broken and withered," in Se- 
lected Sermons of Jonathan Edwards, edited by H. Norman 
Gardiner (Macmillan Company), the climax is : " But now 
this 'strong rod is broken and withered,' and surely the judg- 
ment of God therein is very awful, and the dispensation that 



316 NOTES 

which may well be for a lamentation. Probably we shall be 
more sensible of the worth and importance of such a strong rod 
by the want of it." 

Note 29. Son of Alcseus and husband of Alcmene. Used 
to typify a host. Jupiter personated him in order to marry 
Alcmene, but was interrupted at the feast by the real Amphit- 
ryon. 

Note 30. A provincial construction very common in New 
England. It gives a homely and familiar air to the statement. 

Note 31. This is in various forms frequently asserted by 
Emerson: it is partly prudence, partly courage, and wholly 
paradox. 

Note 32. This is characteristic of Emerson's contempt for 
trifles in human intercourse. 

Note 33. A paraphrase of a sentiment quite ultimate in 
Emerson's theory and practice. It can be traced through all 
his writing. 

Note 34. In this way society is made a meeting of such phi- 
losophers as are described in Plato's Phcedrus. 

Note 35. That is the dry light — an expression of Herac- 
litus meaning that which is nearest purity and the source 
of pure being. 

Note 36. This is characteristic of what was called the 
transcendentalism of the day. " Infinite means to secure finite 
ends." 

Note 37. " Impertinent " is used in the etymological sense of 
the word. 

Note 38. This entire passage should be compared with the 
analysis of society and social conditions presented in George 
Meredith's chapter on the "Comic Spirit" in The Egoist or in 
his Essay on Comedy. 

Note 39. This word illustrates Emerson's usage in empha- 
sizing an understatement, a rhetorical impossibility to most 
persons. The opposite direction of energy they cannot main- 
tain, so they pile up big adjectives or tear down little ones. 
Emerson reverses the process. 

Note 40. An example of this is to be found in the story of 
Mrs. Mulock Craik, John Halifax, Gentleman. 

Note 41. An instance of Emerson's incisive satire. The epi- 
sode of Circe and Ulysses and the latter's transformed compan- 
ions is made to serve as characterization for the alleged lions 
of Fashion. 

Note 42. The clergy as distinguished from the laity, a body 
of clerks, the literati. This is the sense here. 

Note 43. This is a rhetorical device for emphasizing the 
fashionable exclusiveness he wishes to characterize. 

Note 44. An example of very adroit balance of form and 
meaning in parallel phrases. 

Note 45. Another view of this subject is presented in 
George Eliot's "Debasing the Moral Currency" in Impressions 



NOTES 317 

of Theophrastus Such. See also Social Aims: "And beware 
of jokes; too much temperance cannot be used; inestimable 
for sauce, but corrupting for food, we go away hollow and 
ashamed." 

Note 46. The Centenary Edition notes that the source of 
this epitaph is unknown. Doctor Emerson does not think his 
father composed it. 

Note 47. Keats, Hyperion. 

Note 48. " Ethnical " or " ethnic," pertaining to race. In So- 
cial Aims Emerson writes: " He whose word or deed you cannot 
predict, who answers you without any supplication in his eye, 
who draws his determination from within, and draws it instantly, 
— that man rules. 

"The staple figure in novels is the man of aplomb, who sits 
among the young aspirants and desperates, quite sure and 
compact, and, never sharing their affections or debilities, 
hurls his word like a bullet when occasion requires, knows 
his way, and carries "his points. They may scream or applaud, he 
is never engaged or heated. Napoleon is the type of this class 
in modern history; Byron's heros in poetry. But we for the 
most part are all drawn into the charivari; we chide, lament, 
cavil, and recriminate." 

Note 49. This is essentially a Greek conception of the re- 
lation of life and art. It is Platonic in so far as it values art 
in life. The relation of this view of art to that known as art for 
art's sake is suggested. 

Note 50. This use of the superlative is unexpected in the 
connection of Emerson's thought, and the choice of this par- 
ticular adjective to describe the common estimate of femi- 
nine intuition illustrates the intellectual independence of the 
writer. 

Note 51. See John ix, 6, 11, 15, 25. 

Note 52. Hafiz, 'Shums-uddin Muhammad. An eminent 
Persian, died about 1388, one of the lyric poets of all time. 

Firdusi, Abul Kasim Mansur, 940-1020, the great epic poet 
of Persia. 

Note 53. The leading forms which characterize the Byzan- 
tine style are the round arch, the circle, the cross, and the dome 
supported on pendentives. The capitals of the pillars are of 
endless varietv and full of invention. Cent. Diet. 

Note 54. Part of the setting of the typical fairy story or 
didactic tale. Appears in our day as the title of a novel, The 
Golden Book of Venice. 

Note 55. This use of "couple" is an example of easy, fam- 
iliar colloquialism. 

Note 56. The connection between royal blood and fire seems 
too remote for the clear expression of a truth until the reader 
reflects on the ultimate nature of each and its singular power 
of working after its kind. The touch of paradox adds to the 
force. 



318 NOTES 

Note 57. The meaning here does not appear at once. The 
second clause is an understatement of the facts if literally 
taken. Briefly, it is vulgar to insist upon one's own advan- 



Note 58. The Centenary Edition points out the ideal char- 
acter of the hero of this illustration. Osman is the ideal man 
of like conditions with Emerson. 

Note 59. A vigorous alliterative expression in which ban- 
ning means cursing. 

Note 60. This fable was invented by Emerson. C. E. 



FRIENDSHIP 

The exhaustive and interesting introduction to this essay in 
the Centenary Edition contains the following account of the 
text : — 

" This essay was not given as a lecture under this title and as 
a whole in any of the Boston courses, although very probably 
it served in that capacity in some of the Lyceums. As is shown 
in Mr. Cabot's Memoir (Appendix F), portions of it were taken 
from the lecture on ' Society,' in the course on ' The Philosophy 
of History' (1836-37), and others from 'The Heart', in the 
course on 'Human Culture,' given in Boston the following 
year. Several paragraphs come from ' Private Life,' in the 
course on 'The Present Age' (1839-40)." 

The extracts from Emerson's Letters and Journal bearing on 
this theme and quoted in this edition are important. The motto, 
with its controlled ardor and in spite of the contrasting verse 
movement, inevitably recalls some of Shakespeare's Sonnets, as 
XXIX, XXX. Comparison is challenged by the famous essays 
on the same theme by Bacon and by Montaigne. The poetry and 
fiction of literature constantly offer this subject. The teaching 
gathered from Thackeray's Esmond, Lamb's Essays, Milton's 
poetry in Comus, Lycidas, and Paradise Lost, Tennyson's In 
Memoriam contribute to the appreciation of Emerson's insight 
and benevolence. 

Note 1. Cf. Macbeth, II, ii : — 

".Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood 
Clean from my hand? No: this my hand will rather 
The multitudinous seas incarnadine, 
Making the green one red." 

Note 2. Cf . Milton's Comus, 1.5:" The smoke and stir of this 
dim spot:" 1. 7, "Confined and pestered in this pinfold here;" 
1. 17, " With the rank vapours of this sin-worn mould." 

Note 3. This should be compared with the doctrine set forth 
in Compensation. The statement is hardly literally true and it 
requires a careful adjustment of its implications with the teach- 
ings of the Over-Soul and the larger self in Self-Reliance to make 



NOTES 319 

clear the element of truth that it embodies. In the perfect 
character all qualities help; in the imperfect, they too often 
hinder. The lover is proverbially bashful, the surgeon may be 
deserted by his skill if the patient is his own child. It was a 
wonder that William Tell could shoot the apple on the head of 
his son, and the story goes that he strengthened his courage 
and steadied his aim by the thought of the second arrow that he 
had for the tyrant in case the first went amiss. 

Note 4. A description of the happiest results in ideal condi- 
tions only. 

Note 5. A rare expression of the quality in Emerson's 
character described by George E. Woodberry as "a strain of 
haughtiness." 

Note 6. The almost sublime height of this isolation from 
ordinary selfish demands is much more characteristic of Emer- 
son. Affection which requires no return within a thousand 
years, or the beloved object nearer than a universe off, is pecu- 
liarly Emersonian. 

Note 7. Here is the central thought of this conception of 
friendship, allying it to all the considerations presented in this 
group of essays. 

Note 8. See Milton's Comus, 1. 47. 

Note 9. Cf . the point of view in Self -Reliance. 

Note 10. The contraction and expansion of the heart and 
arteries in propelling the blood in circulation. This passage 
relates the experience of friendship to the principle of com- 
pensation. 

Note 11. More precisely this should be the skeleton, or more 
precisely yet, the mummy, given a place at Egyptian banquets 
as a reminder of mortality. 

Note 12. This thought should be traced through its elabo- 
ration in Spiritual Laws and in the essays on Plato and on Swe- 
denborg. 

Note 13. The spiritual detachment indicated by this energetic 
phrase is characteristic. 

Note 14. This characterization of the soul's methods is 
morally possible only through the agency of the Over-Soul, or 
the all-encompassing Deity. On any other principle the doc- 
trine is unworthy of Emerson. 

Note 15. Cf. with the closing sentence of Bacon's Essay on 
Friendship. 

Note 16. This shows the place of friendship in Emerson's 
system of compensation. 

Note 17. The construction of this sentence deserves atten- 
tion for its dramatic compression. 

Note 18. This sentence supplies Emerson's reason for all 
the misadventures of social life. It supplies also his theory 
of the reasonableness of a discontent with conventional soci- 
ety. 

Note 19. Cf. J. S. Mill's On Liberty, chap. ii. 



320 NOTES 

Note 20. See Matthew v, 48: "Be ye therefore perfect, even 
as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." 

Note 21. Shakespeare, Sonnets, XXV. 

Note 22. This German compound means literally nature- 
slowness, and may be compared with Tennyson's phrase in 
Locksley Hall, "the process of the suns." 

Note 23. See Matthew xi, 12: "The kingdom of heaven 
suffereth violence, and the violent take it by storm." 

Note 24. See Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, 
III, ii, "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" 

Note 25. This curious figure has the force of a sudden 
change of pitch and of the homely association it suggests. 

Note 26. Suggestion of the figures used by T. Carlyle in 
Sartor Resartus. 

Note 27. Emerson's relations with Carlyle are an interest- 
ing commentary on this statement. The two volumes of Cor- 
respondence afford many side lights on this considered as a prac- 
tical maxim. It must be remembered, however, that sincerity 
is an expensive form of self-expression. 

Note 28. This is an example of Emerson's extreme opti- 
mism. Probably the statement is intended to be only approxi- 
mately true, for Emerson is no stranger to the fact that men 
deceive themselves and have publics within themselves, before 
which they play their most elaborate parts. 

Note 29. This note in the Centenary Edition gives life to 
this reference : — 

"The allusion is to Jones Very, of Salem, a mystic and as- 
cetic, of whom an interesting account is given in Mr. Cabot's 
Memoir of Emerson, vol. i, chapter x, and a fuller one by Mr. 
W. P. Andrews, in his introduction to Essays and Poems by 
Jones Very. In a letter to Miss Margaret Fuller, written in 
November, 1838, Mr. Emerson wrote: 'Very has been here 
lately and stayed a few days, confounding us all with the 
question whether he was insane. At first sight and speech you 
would certainly pronounce him so. Talk with him a few hours, 
and you will think all insane but he. Monomania or monosania, 
he is a very remarkable person; and though his mind is not 
in a natural, and probably not in a permanent state, he is a 
treasure of a companion, and I had with him most memorable 
conversations.' 

"He records that Very said to him: 'I always felt, when 
I heard you read or speak your writings, that you saw the 
truth better than others, yet I felt that your spirit was not quite 
right. It was as if a vein of colder air blew across me.' " 

Note 30. Probably the term " insanity " is used here to indi- 
cate the broken relations with the conventional man that would 
be the price paid for the experience. 

Note 31. Cf. Bacon on this subject. 

Note 32. Montaigne, Bk. I, xxxix. 

Note 33. See Social Aims : " But we are not content with 



NOTES 321 

pantomime; we say, This is only for the eyes. We want real 
relations of the mind and the heart; we want friendship; we 
want knowledge; we want virtue; a more inward existence 
to read the history of each other. Welfare requires one or two 
companions of intelligence, probity, and grace, to wear out life 
with, — persons with whom we can speak a few reasonable 
words every day, by whom we can measure ourselves, and who 
shall hold us fast to good sense and virtue; and these we are 
always in search of. He must be inestimable to us to whom 
we can say what we cannot say to ourselves. Yet now and then 
we say things to our mates, or hear things from them, which 
seem to put it out of the power of the parties to be strangers 
again. 'Either death or a friend,' is a Persian proverb. I 
suppose I give the experience of many when I give my own. 
A few times in my life it has happened to me to meet persons 
of so good a nature and so good breeding that every topic was 
open and discussed without possibility of offence, — persons 
who could not be shocked. One of my friends said in speaking 
of certain associates : ' There is not one of them but I can offend 
at any moment.' But to the company I am now considering 
were no terrors, no vulgarity. All topics were broached, — 
life, love, marriage, sex, hatred, suicide, magic, theism, art, 
poetry, religion, myself, thyself, all selves and whatever else, 
with a security and vivacity which belonged to the nobility 
of the parties and their brave truth. The life of these persons 
was conducted in the same calm and affirmative manner as 
their discourse. Life with them was an experiment continually 
varied, full of results, full of grandeur, and by no means the 
hot and hurried business which passes in the world." 

Note 34. See Spenser, On His Promised Pension; Shake- 
speare, As You Like It, III, ii ,■ Merry Wives of Windsor, V, vi ; 
Comedy of Errors, II, ii. Sir Thomas More advised an author 
who had sent him his manuscript to read "to put it in rhyme." 
Which being done, Sir Thomas said, "Yea, marry, now it is 
somewhat, for now it is rhyme ; before it was neither rhyme 
nor reason." (Part of the account in Familiar Quotations, Bart- 
lett.) 

Note 35. Compare the different treatment of conversation 
to be found in Social Aims and note the agency attributed to 
women. 

See also Discipline: "We are associated in adolescent and 
adult life with some friends, who, like skies and waters, are co- 
extensive with our idea; who, answering each to a certain affec- 
tion of the soul, satisfy our desire on that side; whom we lack 
power to put at such focal distance from us, that we can mend 
or even analyze them. He cannot choose but love them. When 
much intercourse with a friend has supplied us with a standard 
of excellence, and has increased our respect for the resources of 
God who thus sends a real person to outgo our ideal; when he 
has, moreover, become an object of thought, and, whilst his 



322 NOTES 

character retains all its unconscious effect, is converted in the 
mind into solid and sweet wisdom, — it is a sign to us that his 
office is closing, and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight 
in a short time." 

Note 36. See Social Aims : " But there are people who cannot 
be cultivated, — people on whom speech makes no impression; 
swainish, morose people, who must be kept down and quieted 
as you would those who are a little tipsy; others, who are not 
only swainish, but are prompt to take oath that swainishness 
is the only culture; and though their odd wit may have some 
salt for you, your friends would not relish it. Bolt these out. 
And I have seen a man of genius who made me think that if 
other men were like him cooperation were impossible. Must we 
always talk for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort 
and joy? Here is centrality and penetration, strong understand- 
ing, and the higher gifts, the insight of the real, or from the real, 
and the moral rectitude which belongs to it : but all this and 
all his resources of wit and invention are lost to me in every 
experiment that I make to hold intercourse with his mind; al- 
ways some weary, captious paradox to fight you with, and the 
time and temper wasted. And beware of jokes; too much tem- 
perance cannot be used: inestimable for sauce, but corrupting 
for food, we go away hollow and ashamed. As soon as the com- 
pany give in to this enjoyment, we shall have no Olympus. 
True wit never made us laugh. Mahomet seems to have bor- 
rowed by anticipation of several centuries a leaf from the mind 
of Swedenborg, when he wrote in the Koran: — 

"On the day of resurrection, those who have indulged in 
ridicule will be called to the door of Paradise, and have it shut 
in their faces when they reach it. Again, on their turning back, 
they will be called to another door, and again, on reaching it, 
will see it closed against them; and so on, ad infinitum, without 
end." 

Note 37. See Social Aims : " Manners first, then conversa- 
tion. Later, we see that as life was not in manners, so it is not 
in talk. Manners are external; talk is occasional; these require 
certain material conditions, human labor for food, clothes, house, 
tools, and, in short, plenty and ease, — since only so can certain 
finer and finest powers appear and expand. In a whole nation 
of Hottentots there shall not be one valuable man, — valuable 
out of his tribe. In every million of Europeans or of Americans 
there shall be thousands who would be valuable on any spot 
on the globe." 

Note 38. This is a famous phrase of Emerson's. Cf. in 
Social Aims : — 

"And yet there are trials enough of nerve and character, 
brave choices enough of taking the part of truth and of the 
oppressed against the oppressor, in privatest circles. A right 
speech is not well to be distinguished from action. Courage 
to ask questions; courage to expose our ignorance. The great 



NOTES 323 

gain is, not to shine, not to conquer your companion, — then 
you learn nothing but conceit, — but to find a companion who 
knows what you do not; to tilt with him and be overthrown, horse 
and foot, with utter destruction of all your logic and learning. 
There is a defeat that is useful." 

Note 39. See Uses of Great Men : "Men who know the same 
things are not long the best company for each other." 

Note 40. See George Colman, the younger, Sylvester Dagger- 
wood, or New Hay at the Old Market, sc. i : "I had a soul above 
buttons." 

Note 41. This is the outcome of the principles set forth in 
The Over-Soul, Circles, Compensation, and Heroism. It is the 
generalization that underlies the series of illustrations that 
Emerson found in men and events. Cf. Milton's Comus. 

Note 42. Cf. Social Aims, where the intrusive visitor is 
treated of. 

Note 43. Cf. Hamlet, I, ii: "Would I had met my dearest 
foe in Heaven ! " 

Note 44. Emerson had other moods than this. See his 
poem, The Amulet: — 

*' Your picture smiles as first it smiled; 
The ring you gave is still the same: 
Your letter tells, O changing child! 
No tidings since it came. 

" Give me an amulet 

That keeps intelligence with you, — 
Red when you love, and rosier red, 

And when you love not, pale and blue. 

" Alas! that neither bonds nor vows 
Can certify possession ; 
Torments me still the fear that love 
Died in its last expression." 

Note 45. Another example of Emerson's interest in the 
literature of legal and ethical distinctions. 

Note 46. See Kipling in The Light that Failed : " Be still and 
hear the desert talk." 

Note 47. See Social Aims: "Of course those people, and 
no others, interest us, who believe in their thought, who are 
absorbed, if you please to say so, in their own dream. They 
only can give the key and leading to better society: those who 
delight in each other only because both delight in the eternal 
laws; who forgive nothing to each other; who, by their joy 
and homage to these, are made incapable of conceit, which 
destroys almost all the fine wits. Any other affection between 
men than this geometric one of relation to the same thing, is a 
mere mush of materialism." 

Note 48. Cf. Tennyson's Ulysses: — 



324 NOTES 

"That which we are, we are; 
One equal temper of heroic hearts, 
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will. 
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." 

Note 49. The use of this suggestion from electrical science 
is peculiarly vivid. 

Note 50. See a similar treatment of this theme in Social 
Aims. 

Note 51. Such sentences as these represent the teaching 
known as transcendental. The essays Aristocracy and Nomi- 
nalist and Realist illustrate some of the contributing principles. 
See also the concluding sentences of Nature : — 

"The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is 
forever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the 
virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind of natural 
objects, whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man 
crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. 
That power which does not respect quantity, which makes the 
whole and the particle its equal channel, delegates its smile to 
the morning, and distils its essence into every drop of rain. 
Every moment instructs, and every object; for wisdom is in- 
fused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it 
convulsed us as pain ; it slid into us as pleasure ; it enveloped us 
in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did 
not guess its essence until after a long time." 

It is possible that Emerson never said his last word on friend- 
ship. It was a subject that occupied his thoughts always more 
or less and upon which he never felt that he had satisfied him- 
self. Indeed if such a term could be used of his serene and ample 
spirit, friendship was something about which he was a little un- 
easy. This means that Emerson was a kind man as well as a 
thinker and that his philosophy was not a veneer to his feelings. 
But the essay on Friendship is not his best essay nor most 
characteristic of his genius. Possibly it is the most widely 
known of his essays and undoubtedly has influenced readers 
who have found little else in his work that was congenial. To 
the confirmed reader of Emerson, this essay is a sort of crux. 
To it he returns ; to its incompleteness and wise silences he con- 
fesses his indebtedness. The best commentary on it is all that 
Emerson wrote, particularly the Poems, and of these " Termi- 
nus" is indispensable. 

"As the bird trims her to the gale, 
I trim myself to the storm of time, 
I man the rudder, reef the sail, 
Obey the voice at eve qbeyed at prime: 
' Lowly faithful, banish fear, 
Right onward drive unharmed; 
The port, well worth the cruise, is near, 
And every wave is charmed.' " 



SEP 1 1907 



€f)e ftibergitie literature Jbtckft— continued 

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113. Poems from Emerson. Paper, .15. Nos. 113, 42, one vol., linen, .40. 

114. Peabody's Old Greek Folk Stories. Paper, .15 ; linen, .25. 

115. Browning's Pied Piper of Hamelin, etc. Paper, .15; linen, .25. 

116. Shakespeare's Hamlet. Paper, .30 ; linen, .40. 

117. 118. Stories from the Arabian Nights. In two parts each, paper, .15. 

Nos. 117, 118, one vol., linen, .40. 

119. Poe's The Raven, The Fall of the House of Usher, etc. Paper, .15. 

120. Poe's The Gold-Bug, etc Paper, .15. Nos. 119, 120, one vol., linen, 40. 

121. Speech by Robert Young Hayne on Foote's Resolution. Paper, .15. 

122. Speech by Daniel Webster in Reply to Hayne. Paper, .15. Nos. 121, 

122, one vol., linen, .40. 

123. Lowell's Democracy, etc. Paper, .15. Nos. 39, 123, one vol., linen, .40. 

124. Aldrich's Baby Bell, etc. Paper, .15. 

125. Dryden's Palamon and Arcite. Paper, .155 linen, .25. 

126. Ruskin's King of the Golden River, etc. Paper, .15; linen, .25. 

127. Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, etc. Paper, .15. 

128 Byron's Prisoner of Chillon, etc. Paper, .15; linen, .25. 

129. Plato's Judgment of Socrates. Translated by P. E. More. Paper, .15. 



€fje Jtitoer^iDe literature &tm$- continue 

130. Emerson's The Superlative, and Other Essays. Paper, .15. 

131. Emerson's Nature, and Compensation. Paper, .15. 

132. Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum, etc. Paper, .15; linen, .25. 

133. Schur^s Abraham Lincoln. Paper, .15. 

134. Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel. Paper, .30. Also in Rol/e's Students' 

Series, to 'Peachers, net, .53. 

135. Chaucer's Prologue. Paper, .15; #«*«, .25. 

136. Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, and The Nun's Priest's Tale. Paper, .15. 

Nos. 135, 136, one vol., linen, .40. 

137. Bryant's Iliad. Books 1, VI, XXII, and XXIV. Paper, .15. 

13s. Hawthorne's The Custom House, and Main Street. Paper, .15. 

139. Howells's Doorstep Acquaintance, and Other Sketches. Paper, .15. 

140. Thackeray's Henry Esmond. Paper, .60; linen, .75. 

141. Three Outdoor Papers, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Paper, .15. 

142. Raskin's Sesame and Lilies. Selections. Paper, .15; //«*«, .25. 

143. Plutarch's Life of Alexander the Great. North's Translation. Paper, .15. 

144. Scudder's The Book of Legends. Paper, .15; #«*», .25. 

145. Hawthorne's The Gentle Boy, etc. Paper,. 15. 

146. Longfellow's Giles Corey. Paper, .15. 

147. Pope's Rape of the Lock, etc. Paper, .15; ##*#, .25. 

148. Hawthorne's Marble Faun. Paper, .50; linen, .60. 

149. Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Paper, .i$; linen, .z$. 

150. Ouida's Dog of Flanders, and The Nurnberg Stove. /*«., .15 ; #«*», .25. 

151. Ewing's Jackanapes, and The Brownies. Paper, .15; #«*«, .25. 

152. Martineau's The Peasant and the Prince. Paper, .30; linen, .40. 

153. Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Paper, .15. 

154. Shakespeare's Tempest. Paper, .15 ; //>«■«, .25. 

155. Irving's Life of Goldsmith. Paper, .45; #«*«, .50. 

156. Tennyson's Gareth and Lynette, etc. Paper, .15; linen, .25. 

157. The Song of Roland. Translated by Isahf.i. Butler. Pa., .30', linen, .40. 

158. Malory's Book of Merlin, and Book of Sir Balin. /'rt.,'15; //«<■«, .25. 

159. Beowulf. Translated by C. G. Child. Paper, .15; line?i, .25. 

160. Spenser's Faerie Queene. Book I. Paper, .30; linen, .40. 

161. Dickens's Tale of Two Cities. Paper, .45; //««*, .50. 

162. Prose and Poetry of Cardinal Newman Selections. {In preparation^ 

163. Shakespeare's Henry V. Paper, .15; linen, .2$. 

164. DeQuincey's Joan of Arc, and The English Mail-Coach. Pa. ,.15 ; //«., .25. 

165. Scott's Quentin Durward. Paper, .$0; linen, .bo. 

166. Carlyle's Heroes and Hero-Worship. Paper, .45 ; //W«, .50. 

167. Norton's Memoir of Longfellow. Paper, .15; linen, .25. 
if>s. Shelley's Poems. Selected. Paper, .45; linen, .50. 

169. Loweli's My Garden Acquaintance, etc. Paper, .15. 

170. Lamb's Essays of Elia. Selected. Paper, .30; linen, .40. 

171. 172. Emerson's Essays. Selected. In two parts, each, paper, .15; Nos. 

171, 172, one vol., linen, .40. 

EXTRA NUMBERS 

A American Authors and their Birthdays. Paper, .15. 

.5 Portraits and Biographical Sketches of 20 American Authors. Paper, .15 

C A Longfellow Night. Paper, .15. 

/? Scudder's Literature in School. Paper, .15. 

A" Dialogue and Scenes from Harriet Beecher Stowe. Paper, .15. 

/? Longfellow Leaflets. Paper, .30 ; #«*«, .40. 

<7 Whitticr Leaflets. Paper, .30; #«*«, «**, .40. 

// Holmes Leaflets. Paper, .30 ; #«/?«, .40. 

/ Holbrook's Northland Heroes. Linen, .35. 

A' The Riverside Primer and Reader. Linen, .30. 

L The Riverside Song Book. Paper, .30 ; boards, .40. 

M Lowell's Fable for Critics. Paper, .30 

N Selections from the Writings of Eleven American Authors. Pa., -is 

O Lowell Leaflets. Paper, .30; linen, .40. 

/> Holbrook's Hiawatha Primer. Linen, .40. 

() Selections from the Writings of Eleven English Authors. Paper, .15. 

A' Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. Selected. Paper. .20: linen, .30. 

5" Irving's Essays from the Sketch-Book. Selected. Paper, .30; linen, .40. 

£/ A Dramatization of The Song of Hiawatha. Paper, .15. 

V Holbrook's Book of Nature Myths. Linen, .45. 
W Brown's In the Days of Giants. Linen, .50. 
X Poems for the Study of Language. Paper, .30; linen, .40. 

Y Warner's In the Wilderness. Paper, .20 ; linen, .30. 
Z Nine Selected Poems. N. Y. Regents' Requirements. Pa., .15; linen, .25 



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